The Cassini spacecraft takes a look through the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon to spy light and dark in the area called Adiri on Titan.
See PIA08995 to see a wider view of this albedo feature on Titan. This view looks toward the moon's anti-Saturn side and is centered on terrain at 2 degrees south latitude, 218 degrees west longitude. North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up and rotated 6 degrees to the left.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 29, 2010 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 285,000 kilometers (177,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is about 2 kilometers (about 1 mile) 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 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.