Titan’s orbit

Titan in its orbit around Saturn

Saturn is the only bright planet available in the night sky at this time of year, and so we have had to observe it frequently for various commissioning tasks. Jim Geach has put together this nice composite from a subset of that data showing the track of Titan in its orbit.

Titan follows its orbital ellipse nicely, and in the centre, we can see Saturn and its rings (the scaling stretched here to show that bright detail). I’ll let the audience decide on whether Iapetus really was detected on the 20th of April (the circle to the top-left of the image shows its position on that date).

Note that all these data are at 450 µm.