Senkyo and Vortex
The Cassini spacecraft simultaneously peers through the haze in Titan's equatorial region down to its surface and captures the vortex of clouds hovering over its south pole just to the right of the terminator on the moon's dark side.
The dark region near Titan's equator is Senkyo. See Details of Dark Senkyo for a closer view of Senkyo and to learn more. For a color image of the south polar vortex on Titan, see Titan's Colorful South Polar Vortex. For a movie of the vortex, see Titan's South Polar Vortex in Motion.
Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across). North on Titan is up and rotated 11 degrees to the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 20, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
<< Previous Cassini