viernes, 25 de mayo de 2007

Deserted islands

Guess... Where are these islands located? It's not in your neighborhood wherever you are. It's not white sand beaches and warm sunshine! Although that does sound good right now. Nice cocktail as well then. :) The place you look at is very cold actually. The see is liquid methane. This is a picture made may 12th by the Cassini spacecraft flying over the moon Titan. How come that you can see so clearly because Titan has that dense orange haze in the atmosphere blocking the surface? It's a radar image actually. The islands are probably more mountain tops sticking out of the liquid methane which they estimate could be tens of meters deep. You could see methane rainbows if you are willing to stand -180 degrees C. They would be rare because there is because of the dense atmosphere barely direct sunlight. Also light refracts differently in methane than in water droplets. So a Titan rainbow would have the some colors as here with an overall tone of orange because of the orange hazy atmosphere.