Watch Titan Occult a Binary Star System

By Nancy Atkinson - August 27, 2010 at 11:31 AM UTC | Planetary Science

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Scott Kardel from the Palomar Observatory just posted something extremely cool on his

Palomar Skies website.

Back in 2001, a group of astronomers used the 200-inch Hale Telescope equipped with adaptive optics to observe Saturn's moon Titan pass in front of a binary star system. The binary stars are separated in the sky by just 1.5 arc seconds, but because of the fantastic resolving power of the Hale and its adaptive optics, visible in the image above is the light of the star nearest to Titan being refracted by Titan's dense atmosphere. As Scott said, such events are rare but valuable.

Mike Brown

(of Eris fame) was among the astronomers and on

Twitter

today, he

linked to a video

the team created from their observations, which is just awesome. Not only did they see the occultation, but they also found out that Titan has jet stream-like winds in its atmosphere.

Watch the movie

, (or see below, someone has now YouTubed it) and

then read their paper about the event!

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com