259 – Unnamed Methane Sea On Titan « Strange Maps
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Except for some of the harsh, impermanently inhabited and sparsely visited inlands of Kerguélen, there are no places left on Earth to name.

Those with a penchant for baptising should look to the priesthood, or take a more literal interest in heaven – there are ever more known worlds out there, and precious little of those exoplanets have been explored, let alone provided with toponyms.Even within our own solar system, the field is still wide open. Although all planets and moons in our solar system have been named, many of their geograpical features haven’t.

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, was discovered in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens. Titan is larger in diameter than the smallest planet, (Neptune) Mercury, and 50% larger than our own Moon. It is the only moon in our solar system to have a dense atmosphere – so dense that, in combination with its limited gravity, humans on Titan could fly by just flapping their arms.

The orange opacity of Titan’s atmosphere makes the moon appear bigger than it actually is – astronomers have since distinguished between permanent cloud cover and surface, and downgraded it from the first- to the second-largest moon in our system, after Jupiter’s satellite Ganymede.

Not until the flyby, in 2004, of the Cassini-Huygens mission could scientists confirm the speculation, first ignited by both Voyager missions and then heightened by Hubble observations, that Titan is the only heavenly body (save Earth) to contain large liquid surfaces – or seas, as non-astronomers would call them. For they seem a bit too small to be labelled oceans.

Nothing like relaxing in natural hydrocarbons. You haven’t lived until you’ve farted in a methane sea.