{"id":40474,"date":"2011-10-16T15:45:21","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T15:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/a-window-into-titan-bad-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2011-10-16T15:45:21","modified_gmt":"2011-10-16T15:45:21","slug":"a-window-into-titan-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/a-window-into-titan-bad-astronomy.php","title":{"rendered":"A window into Titan | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know I just posted a global color map of Saturn’s moon Titan<\/a>, but sometimes it’s cool just to take a step back and look at a picture that gives a little context… and it doesn’t hurt that it’s a moody grayscale shot, too:<\/p>

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[Click to encronosenate.]<\/p>

This shot of Titan was taken by the Cassini spacecraft<\/a> back in August, and shows the moon superposed on Saturn’s rings, seen here almost — but not quite — edge-on. <\/p>

The fact that you can see surface detail on Titan is a dead giveaway this shot was taken in the infrared: optical light, the kind we see, can’t penetrate the thick, hazy, nitrogen\/methane atmosphere blanketing this moon. Infrared light gets through, though, so surface features can be seen. In fact, this image was taken using a filter that lets through light at 938 nanometers (the reddest light the human eye can see is about 750 nm). Methane is pretty good at absorbing light at a bunch of different wavelengths, but at 938 nm it’s transparent, so this is a particularly good place in the spectrum to look at Titan — astronomers call it the \"methane window\". Not only that, but this image also employed a polarizing filter, which blocks a lot of light from the atmospheric haze, making the surface easier to see (it also makes rainbows appear and disappear<\/a>, too). <\/p>

Not that the atmosphere is completely invisible in this picture: look around the moon’s edge and you can just see some of the upper atmospheric layers<\/a>, and at the top you can easily spot the north polar hood, which may have water ice crystals in it.<\/p>

And that dark region on Titan’s surface? It may have once been the bed of a methane sea, but now it’s a dry, vast area of wind-blown dunes, hydrocarbon grains collected by the Titanian winds. It’s called Shangri-La, and that makes me smile. I’m not sure anything at -180°C could be called a human paradise, but for astronomers, it’s certainly a scientific one.<\/p>

Related posts:<\/p>

- Polarized rainbow, what does this mean???<\/a>
- In astronomy, a polarizing view is good<\/a>
- Watch out, Titan! Vader’s onto you!<\/a>
- A hidden world revealed: Titan<\/a><\/p>

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I know I just posted a global color map of Saturn’s moon Titan, but sometimes it’s cool just to take a step back and look at a picture that gives a little context… and it doesn’t hurt that it’s a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40474"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}