Direct imaging of Titan’s extended haze layer from HST observations

[1] In the early 1980s, both Voyager spacecraft imaged a detached haze layer surrounding Titan, separated from the main haze distribution by a gap at around 300 km and merging into a hood of more concentrated haze at Titan’s north pole. We have processed Hubble Space Telescope images of Titan with Lucy-Richardson and PIXON deconvolution software and point spread functions generated by TinyTim 6.0 to detect the extended haze layer for the first time since the Voyager encounters. Images taken from 1994 through 2000 show not only that the extended haze layer still exists, but also that it has migrated from south to north during that interval.