This image was taken during Cassini's very close approach to Titan on Dec. 13, 2004.

The view shows pronounced banding in the Titan atmosphere. The image has been processed to enhance the banding, but a few artifacts of the imaging process, such as the small "doughnut" shape at right, remain.

The image was obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera at a distance of approximately 124,800 kilometers (77,500 miles) from Titan, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 890 nanometers. The Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle is 15 degrees. The image scale is about 7.5 kilometers (4.6 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 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.