New Titan Image: Cassini's Views of Titan

CICLOPS has released three global views of Titan taken during last week's flyby. Each view shows views of Titan taken through various filters. The first view shows Titan in nearly true color, using the Red, Green, and Violet filters on the wide angle camera. Light returned in these wavelengths is dominated by scattered light from the high-altitude haze layers in Titan's stratosphere. The hydrocarbons in these haze layers gives Titan its orange cast at visible wavelengths. The second view use a sum of several CB3 filter (938 nanometer) images. This is the best filter for observing Titan's surface. Brightness variations in this filter are due solely to albedo variations on the surface, with little to no contribution from topographic shading, thanks to the effectiveness of the haze layer to scatter light, even if it allows light at that wavelength to pass through. The final view, also shown above, combines a violet filter image (shown as blue, shows high-altitude hazes), a CB3 filter image (shown as green, shows surface), and an MT3 filter image (shown as red, shows the strong methane absorbtion of Titan's stratosphere).

These images were taken from a distance of 170,000 km from Titan and have a pixel scale of around 10 kilometers per pixel.

More processed images from the T5 flyby will be available next week.