Liquid lakes on Titan

Titan, Saturn's moon.

The Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006, confirmed the existence of lakes of liquid methane on Saturn's moon Titan. Radar imaging data from the flyby, published this week in the journal Nature, provide convincing evidence for large bodies of liquid.

This image, used on the journal's cover, gives a taste of what Cassini saw. Intensity in this colorized image is proportional to how much radar brightness is returned, or more specifically, the logarithm of the radar backscatter cross-section. The colors are not a representation of what the human eye would see.