Image: Cassini Looks Through Titan’s Atmosphere

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft looks toward the night side of Saturn’s largest moon and sees sunlight scattering through the periphery of Titan’s atmosphere and forming a ring of color.

Titan’s north polar hood can be seen at the top of this view, and a hint of the south polar vortex can be detected at the bottom. See PIA08137 to learn more about the north polar hood. See PIA14919 and PIA14920 to learn more about the south polar vortex.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across). North on Titan is up and rotated 9 degrees to the right.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 6, 2012, at a distance of approximately 134,000 miles (216,000 kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 8 miles (13 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, 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.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI. Larger image