Rings Occulting Titan

Titan shines beyond Saturn's rings like a brilliant ring of fire, its light gleaming here and there through the gaps in Saturn's magnificent plane of ice.

By Space War Editorial Team · Editorial process

Published July 16, 2006

Titan shines beyond Saturn's rings like a brilliant ring of fire, its light gleaming here and there through the gaps in Saturn's magnificent plane of ice.

Giant moon Titan, which is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across – twice the size of Earth's Moon – is surrounded by a thick photochemical haze that scatters the Sun's light.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft took this image in visible light with its narrow-angle camera on June 11, at a distance of approximately 5.3 million kilometers (3.3 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 158 degrees.

Image scale is 32 kilometers (20 miles) per pixel on Titan.

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Space War Editorial Team

The Space War Editorial Team produces content across our two editorial pillars: space industry news and Mind & Meaning. We cover launches, missions, satellites, defense, and the technology of getting humans to space, alongside the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Space War takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.