Astronomy Picture of the Day - powered by LUNEXIT.IT

A huge arrow-shaped Storm blows across the Equatorial Regions of Titan, as it can be clearly seen in this image taken by the NASA's Cassini Spacecraft, and chronicling the Seasonal Weather Changes on Saturn's largest moon. This Storm might have created large effects on the Surface of Titan, likely in the form of dark pools and floods, as better visible in later images. After this Storm dissipated, Cassini observed significant changes on Titan's Surface at the Southern Boundary of the large Dunefield named Belet. Those changes covered an area of approx. 500.000 square Km (such as about 310.500 square miles), or roughly the combined area of Arizona and Utah in the United States. The part of the Storm that is visible here measures approx. 1200 Km (such as 745,2 miles) in length East-to-West. The wings of the Storm that trail off to the North/West and South/West from the Easternmost point of the Storm itself and each of them is approx. 1500 Km (931,5 miles) long.

Titan's Weather has been changing a lot since the August 2009 Equinox, when the Sun lays directly over the Equators of Saturn and its moons, and Storms at low Latitudes are now more common. This image is a mosaic of two Cassini images. Most of this view is from an image of the Storm captured on Sept. 27, 2010. However, because that image's framing cut off the South Polar Region of Titan, a second image of it, taken on July 9, 2010, was used to fill in that portion of the Celestial Body. This second image was re-projected to the same Viewing Geometry as the first one. Lit Terrain seen here is in the area between the Trailing Hemisphere, which is that side of Titan that faces backward in its orbit around Saturn, and the side of Titan that always faces away from Saturn. North on Titan is up.

The images were taken with the NASA -Cassini Spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a spectral filter of Near-InfraRed Light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approx. 1,3 MKM (807.300 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-Spacecraft, or Phase, Angle of 44°. Image scale is roughly 8 Km (4,968 miles) per pixel.

This frame has been colorized in Absolute Natural Colors (such as the colors that a human eye would actually perceive if someone were onboard the NASA - Cassini Spacecraft and then looked outside, towards the Saturnian moon Titan), by using an original technique created - and, in time, dramatically improved - by the Lunar Explorer Italia Team.