Revealing Titan's surface

These three pictures were created from a sequence of images acquired by the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens spacecraft Imaging Science Subsystem on 25 October 2004, 38 hours before its closest approach to Titan.

The first picture is a single image that has undergone only basic cleaning of corrupted pixels and imperfections in the camera's charge coupled device, a light-sensitive detector similar to those found in digital cameras. In the middle frame, multiple images were used to enhance the contrast detected from Titan's surface and to reduce the blurring effect of atmospheric haze. The last picture has been further processed to sharpen the edges of features.

These images were acquired by Cassini-Huygens on 25 October 2004, at an altitude of 702 000 kilometres and a pixel scale of 4.2 kilometres. The Sun was illuminating Titan from nearly behind the spacecraft.