Titan’s Cocoon

Sunlight scatters through Titan's atmosphere, illuminating high hazes and bathing the entire moon in a soft glow.

This high phase angle view of Titan was acquired from 21 degrees below the smoggy moon's equator. The thin, detached haze layer that extends all the way around Titan is faintly visible.

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

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 12, 2007 at a distance of approximately 305,000 kilometers (190,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 146 degrees. Image scale is 18 kilometers (11 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