Rings Occulting Titan

Titan shines beyond the rings like a brilliant ring of fire, its light gleaming here and there through the gaps in Saturn's magnificent plane of ice.

Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is surrounded by a thick photochemical haze which scatters the Sun's light.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2006 at a distance of approximately 5.3 million kilometers (3.3 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 158 degrees. Image scale is 32 kilometers (20 miles) per pixel on Titan.

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