image: With its thick, distended atmosphere, Titan's orange globe shines softly, encircled by a thin halo of purple light-scattering haze.
Images taken using blue (BL2), green and red (CB1) spectral filters were used to create this enhanced-color view; the color images were combined with an ultraviolet (UV3) view that makes the high altitude detached haze layer visible. The ultraviolet part of the composite image was given a purplish hue to match the bluish-purple color of the upper atmospheric haze seen in visible light.
The small haze particles which populate high hazes in Titan's atmosphere scatter short wavelengths more efficiently than longer visible or infrared wavelengths, thus the best possible observations of the detached layer are made in ultraviolet light.
The images in this view were taken by the Cassini narrow-angle camera on May 5, 2005 at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 137 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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 Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute