Titan: Banded Moon

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute , Posted on: Sunday, 20 July 2008, 09:12 CDT Download full size image

This Cassini spacecraft view of Titan shows banding in the atmosphere of the moon's northern hemisphere.

Like the planet Venus, Titan's atmosphere rotates faster than its surface, a characteristic called "super rotation."

North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up.

White specks seen on Titan are artifacts of the process used to enhance features in the moon's atmosphere. The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 28, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 185,000 kilometers (115,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 89 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.

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