Has It Been Almost a Year?

Since 365 Days of Astronomy Began?

Listen and enjoy to astronomy podcasts!
Listen and enjoy to astronomy podcasts!

Hard to believe that this wonderful “podcast-a-day” about astronomy-related topics is nearly a year old. It’s been interesting to listen to so many different viewpoints on astronomy, space science, planetary science, scientists, astronomers, and so on. It’s also been fun producing 11 of the segments for the project.

The good news is that 365 Days of Astronomy will continue into 2010 and from what I hear, the year is filling up fast. I’ll be back, and I hope that a lot of other contributors will be back, too. And, of course it will be good to welcome first-timers to the group, too.

My last podcast for 2009 is “airing” today — it’s a tribute to Carl Sagan. I think that Dr. Sagan would be pleased to see so many people sharing their personal visions of the cosmos through 365 Days, just as he shared his personal voyage through the landmark series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. I also think he’d also be amazed at what the Web and Internet have become — in a good way — as places to share the latest and greatest about astronomy and space physics.

That’s the beauty of the 365 Days project — it disseminates people’s personal visions about a science that touches us all.  If you haven’t listened to 365 Days, you have a whole year of podcasts to catch up on. And, there’s another year to look forward to, so check it out!  And, if you’re so inclined, think about producing a podcast for it.  The contact information is on the main page and I know that they’d love to hear from you.

Happy listening!

One Shimmery Lake

Titan Has a Liquid Lake: is this News?  Yeah!!

A flash of sunlight glints off a lake on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Courtesy NASA and the Cassini Equinox Mission.
A flash of sunlight glints off a lake on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Courtesy NASA and the Cassini Equinox Mission.

I know this hit the news a few days ago, but it’s such an historical image that I wanted to show it here.

If you’ve been buried hip-deep in holiday preparations and celebrations, you might not have known that the Cassini Equinox Mission returned an image of Titan that shows a lake of liquid something on the surface of the cloud-shrouded moon of Saturn.  That lake is called Kraken Mare.

That little flash of light you see is a specular reflection off the surface of the liquid. Specular reflections are commonly seen on Earth when the sunlight flashes off bodies of water here. But, this is not likely to be water on Titan. Kraken is a hydrocarbon lake (hydrocarbons are things like methane and ethane). It stretches across about 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles) across the northern surface.

Now, the cool thing about this image (along with the flash) is that we can actually even detect that glint. Most of the time Titan is covered in clouds.  Optically it makes it very difficult to see anything on the surface, but wavelengths of infrared light get through.  As Saturn and Titan approach their spring equinox, the viewing angle is just right, and scientists using an infrared-sensitive instrument onboard the Cassini spacecraft were able to detect the glint in infrared wavelengths.  This is pretty exciting news.  It’s cool because it’s there, first of all, and second because we’ve been able to see it with special instruments.  Third, the existence of that lake will help planetary scientists understand more about the interactions between the surface and the atmosphere of Titan and the conditions that help make the existence of that lake possible. Stay tuned!