The Air Up There

This specially processed composite view reveals a tremendous amount of structure in the northern polar atmosphere of Titan. The hazes in Titan's atmosphere are known to extend hundreds of kilometers above the surface.

Structure visible here could be due to multiple detached hazes, or waves in the atmosphere that propagate through stably stratified layers.

Ten images taken during a brief period were processed to enhance fine detail and then were combined to create this view.

North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up.

The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 18, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 155 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) 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, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

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

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute