Crescent Titan

Following its first flyby of Titan, Cassini gazed back at the smog-enshrouded moon?s receding crescent. This natural color view was seen by the spacecraft about one day after closest approach. The slight bluish purpose glow of Titan?s haze is visible along the limb.

The superimposed coordinate system grid in the accompanying image at right illustrates the geographical regions of the moon that are illuminated and visible, as well as the orientation of Titan ? lines of longitude converge on the South Pole near the moon?s eastern limb. The yellow curve marks the position of the boundary between day and night on Titan.

Images taken through blue, green and red filters were combined to create this natural color view. The image were obtained using the wide angle camera on July 3, 2004, from a distance of about 790,000 kilometers (491,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 115 degrees. The image scale is 47 kilometers (29 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Original Source: CICLOPS News Release