Bonestell's Titan

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This is an adaptation of a panorama painted by Chesley Bonestell in 1959 for the Griffith Observatory Planetarium in Los Angeles. It shows the surface of Saturn's moon Titan as we expected it might look when we knew it had some atmosphere, but knew little else about it. Actually, Titan is almost completely wrapped in orange clouds, with a methane atmosphere. The sky is most certainly not blue, and you would be extremely hard pressed to see Saturn at all through the clouds.  But this is the way it "should have been".  I've extended the image to include a full starry sky and more foreground features. Also, the images I had to work with did not wrap completely around the horizon, so I have done a bit of duplicating/flipping of features to make a seamless panorama.

Images used with the permission of Bonestell Space Art.
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