Reflection of sunlight on Titan lakes photographed!

[h2ouniverse]

The reflection of Sun over the lake district of the North Pole of Titan on this picture on NASA's site:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassi ... 91217.html

evidencing bodies of liquid...
They expect the reflection to come from the southern shoreline of Kraken Mare.

 

[3488]

Hi Joel,,

I have put an entry on the Cassini Mission update thread in M&L, but I agree, this is most worthy of it's own thread on here. :mrgreen:

Below I cropped out said glint on methane lake in IR & enlarged it.

Andrew Brown.

 

[h2ouniverse]

Re: Refletion of sunlight on Titan lakes photographed!

Hi Andrew,

oops! we posted at the same time.
I bet that this picture (or a potential even better future one, as equinox is going to provide for more grazing illumination of northern areas) is going to become among the most emblematic of Cassini's mission.

Thanks for pasting the picture. I still have not understood how to paste a picture with the new SDC interface...

Best regards.

 

[3488]

Hi Joel, no oops about it. I only put the one on the Cassini thread as an update of the Cassini mission. This thread is topic driven as Planetary Science & as i said, this is worthy of it's own thread here. If you had not already started one, I would have.

Images, if an image is linkable, use right mouse click on it > copy shortcut > then on here type

, then it should appear.

My crops & enlargements, I have to host on a third party, I usually use Photodump, then follow procedure as above from there.

So for instance

(I put in asterixes, so not to complete the process). Then taking the asterixes out you get the below.

I hope that helps? Also images should be max 740 wide.

Andrew Brown.

 

[abq_farside]

Pretty amazing!

 

[CalliArcale]

That is perhaps the most significant photo of the entire Cassini mission. Not the most beautiful, but what it represents is amazing. We are seeing something here which we have not seen on any other world besides Earth -- sunlight glinting off of a lake. A huge lake of liquid hydrocarbons, but still.

Words do not describe.

 

[3488]

I agree totally Calli, this is most significant.

It is not the first body of standing liquid on another world seen, that belongs to Voyager 1 with the lava lakes on the Jupiter moon Io, but this is the first ever 'Earthlike' sunglint seen on liquid on another world.

I will go through the Cassini raw images & see if I can find some more.

Andrew Brown.

 

[CalliArcale]

True, but lava just isn't the same -- and it doesn't glint like this.