Titan and Dione

Saturn's fourth-largest moon, Dione, can be seen through the haze of the planet's largest moon, Titan, in this view of the two posing before the planet and its rings from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

The north polar hood can be seen on Titan appearing as a detached layer at the top of the moon here. See Haze Layers on Titan and Titan's Hazes to learn more about Titan's atmosphere and the north polar hood.

See Dione's Icy Wisps and At Carthage Linea to learn more about and see a closer view of the wisps on Dione's trailing hemisphere, which appear as bright streaks here.

This view looks toward the sides of Titan (3,200 miles or 5,150 kilometers across) and Dione (698 miles or 1,123 kilometers across) facing away from Saturn. North is up on the moons. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ring plane.

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 narrow-angle camera on May 21, 2011, at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Titan and 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) from Dione. Image scale is 9 miles (14 kilometers) per pixel on Titan and 12 miles (19 kilometers) on Dione.

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