Bright Brothers in the Night

Cassini looks toward Tethys and its great crater Odysseus, while at the same time capturing veiled Titan in the distance (at left).
Titan is shrouded in a thick, smog-like atmosphere in which many small, potential impactors burn up before hitting the Planet's surface.
Crater-pocked Tethys has no such protective layer, although even a thick blanket of atmosphere would have done little good against the impactor that created Odysseus.
The eastern limb of Tethys is overexposed in this view.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 6, 2006, at a distance of approximately 4 MKM (about 2,5 MMs) from Titan and 2,7 MKM (about 1,7 MMs) from Tethys. The image scale is approx. 25 Km (about 16 miles) per pixel on Titan and approx. 16 Km (about 10 miles) per pixel on Tethys.