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File:Two Halves of Titan.png

Summary

Description
English: Seasonal changes in the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon are captured in this natural colour image which shows Titan with a slightly darker top half and a slightly lighter bottom half. Titan's atmosphere has a seasonal hemispheric dichotomy, and this image was taken shortly after Saturn's August 2009 equinox. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural colour view. Scientists have found that the winter hemisphere typically appears to have more high-altitude haze, making it darker at shorter wavelengths (ultraviolet through blue) and brighter at infra-red wavelengths. The switch between dark and bright occurred over the course of a year or two around the last equinox. Scientists are studying the mechanism responsible for this change, and will monitor the dark-light difference as it flip-flops now that the 2009 equinox has signalled the coming of spring and then summer in the northern hemisphere. Although this hemispheric boundary appears to run directly east-west near the equator, its position is not level with latitude and is actually offset from the equator by about 10 degrees of latitude. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan (5150 kilometres across). North on Titan is up. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 174,000 kilometres from Titan. Image scale is 10 kilometres per pixel.
Deutsch: Titan im sichtbaren Licht; aufgenommen aus einer Entfernung von 174.000 Kilometern (Raumsonde Cassini, 2009).
Date 25 August 2009
Source [ http://ciclops.org/view/5810/Two_Halves_of_Titan or http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11603
Shuttle.svg This image or video was catalogued by Jet Propulsion Lab of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under Photo ID: PIA11603.
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Author NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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