Seasonal Change on Titan's - HST, Cassini and Amateur Observations

Details Seasonal Change on Titan's - HST, Cassini and Amateur Observations Seasonal Change on Titan's - HST, Cassini and Amateur Observations

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008epsc.conf..942l&link_type=abstract

European Planetary Science Congress 2008, Proceedings of the conference held 21-25 September, 2008 in Münster, Germany. Online a

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Abstract Saturn's moon Titan is a dynamic object that changes on seasonal and even hourly timescales. Even with modest amateur equipment (an 8-inch telescope and a CCD camera) it is possible, with care, to make useful scientific observations of Titan of this distant, but remarkably Earth-like, body. The most obvious feature in Voyager's images of Titan was the difference in albedo between the north and south hemispheres, now known primarily to be a seasonal variation in the abundance of organic haze driven by advection from the summer to the winter hemisphere. This north-south asymmetry was seen by HST in the 1990s to have reversed (with the south then darker in blue wavelengths, implying more haze). By about 2000, the asymmetry had again reversed at some wavelengths: reversal occurs first at those wavelengths which probe the higher altitudes, such as deep in methane bands. (With a small diffraction grating, it is possible to take a Titan spectrum in a few minutes with an 8-inch telescope and a CCD camera that can show these methane bands - in essence repeating Kuiper's 1944 discovery of an atmosphere on Titan). Because the two hemispheres which are presented by different amounts to the Earth as the seasonal geometry changes, the disk-integrated albedo (which can be monitored photometrically with a small telescope) changes from year-to-year. This 14-year cycle has been monitored, although only at a couple of wavelengths, since 1970 and shows changes of several per cent. Cassini imaging and other data show other seasonal changes on Titan in unprecedented detail, such as the changing distribution of tropospheric methane rainclouds, a detached layer of haze and the curious dark north polar hood (analogous in some ways to the Earth's ozone hole). While the last few years (Titan's southern autumn) have been relatively quiescent as the subsolar point moves rapidly north, crossing the equator at northern spring equinox in 2009, dramatic changes may occur that can be observed both by Cassini and by amateur astronomers. References Additional resources on amateur observations of Titan are available at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~rlorenz

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