Image:Titan in natural colour Cassini.jpg

Summary

Original caption

This natural colour composite was taken during the Cassini spacecraft's April 16, 2005, flyby of Titan. It is a combination of images taken through three filters that are sensitive to red, green and violet light.

It shows approximately what Titan would look like to the human eye: a hazy orange globe surrounded by a tenuous, bluish haze. The orange colour is due to the hydrocarbon particles which make up Titan's atmospheric haze. This obscuring haze was particularly frustrating for planetary scientists following the NASA Voyager mission encounters in 1980-81. Fortunately, Cassini is able to pierce Titan's veil at infrared wavelengths (see PIA06228).

North on Titan is up and tilted 30 degrees to the right.

The images to create this composite were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera on April 16, 2005, at distances ranging from approximately 173,000 to 168,200 kilometers (107,500 to 104,500 miles) from Titan and from a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 56 degrees. Resolution in the images is approximately 10 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

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

Source

This image or video was catalogued by Jet Propulsion Lab of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under Photo ID: PIA06230. This tag does not indicate the copyright status or the source of the attached work. A normal copyright tag and a source are still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information.

Licensing

This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". ( NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy). Deutsch | English | Español | Français | Galego | Nederlands | Português | Русский | ‪中文(简体)‬ | ‪中文(繁體)‬ | +/-

Warnings: Use of NASA logos, insignia and emblems are restricted per US law 14 CFR 1221. The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the Soviet/ Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not necessarily in the public domain. Materials from the Hubble Space Telescope may be copyrighted if they do not explicitly come from the STScI. All materials created by the SOHO probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use. Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted.