Hazy Orange Orb

Titan's atmosphere makes Saturn's largest moon look like a fuzzy orange ball in this natural color view from the Cassini spacecraft.

Titan's north polar hood is visible at the top of the image, and a faint blue haze also can be detected above the south pole at the bottom of this view. Recent Cassini images suggest Titan's north polar vortex, or hood, is beginning to flip from north to south (see Orange and Blue Hazes). See Haze Layers on Titan and Above Titan's North to learn more about the moon's atmosphere.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across). North is up.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 30, 2012 at a distance of approximately 119,000 miles (191,000 kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute