Violet Titan

The Cassini spacecraft peers at the smooth globe of Titan, wrapped in its photochemical haze.

The moon's thin, detached, high-altitude haze layer is best viewed at shorter wavelengths of light, as in this violet light image and ultraviolet views (see Bands of Titan).

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

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 22, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 214,000 kilometers (133,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 119 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