Starship Asterisk*

Seeing Titan

Explanation: Shrouded in a thick atmosphere, Saturn's largest moon Titan really is hard to see. Small particles suspended in the upper atmosphere cause an almost impenetrable haze, strongly scattering light at visible wavelengths and hiding Titan's surface features from prying eyes. But Titan's surface is better imaged at infrared wavelengths where scattering is weaker and atmospheric absorption is reduced. Arrayed around this centered visible light image of Titan are some of the clearest global infrared views of the tantalizing moon so far. In false color, the six panels present a consistent processing of 13 years of infrared image data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) on board the Cassini spacecraft. They offer a stunning comparison with Cassini's visible light view.

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Spectacular differences.
Is this always the same viewpoint ?

And what are the different and differing views thought to represent. ?
Weather, climate, clouds, geography, lakeside resorts ?

False color, but I am guessing, layman terms, that the brown area is exposed rocky areas, as seen in the video of the Huygens lander. The white could be frozen ices such as co2 or nitrogen. The purple could be the liquid black lakes of, I forget, liquid ammonia? as also seen in Huygens.

At first I thought it was a Sun, with some planet representations...glad I read the caption.

Quite the contrast...

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Boomer12k wrote: ↑Sat Aug 18, 2018 7:46 pm At first I thought it was a Sun, with some planet representations...glad I read the caption.

Quite the contrast...

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No offense, but I thought of this... a snippet of a joke by Brian Regan, one of the best observational comedians.

Given an email request, the University of Nantes has been added to the credit line in the main NASA APOD. We apologize for the oversight.
- RJN