This article originally appeared on the In Saturn's Rings website and is reposted here with permission.

I’m going to begin by posing a seemingly trivial question. Think, if you will, of a real, existent world in our solar system that boasts all of these attributes: craggy mountains, a thick nitrogen atmosphere, rivers, sand dunes, rain, clouds, lakes, and even seas.

What would your answer be?

Earth, right?

That would be a valid answer, for sure. And since even Mars, as it is today, cannot count off so many terrestrial features, you would be forgiven for thinking that Earth is the *only* correct answer.

But it isn’t. A second world out there also ticks all those boxes—it is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

In the cold, outermost reaches of our solar system, where icy, mordant permafrost once was thought to reign supreme, lurks the closest known analog to Earth. Titan is larger than even the planet Mercury, and over the past decade, the Cassini probe has helped lift the veil on this extraordinary and sophisticated world.

I’m Ian Regan, producer of the Titan segment of In Saturn's Rings. Normally, I only play with space imagery and spacecraft data for kicks, but this time I’m working on a project that not only sits snugly in my wheelhouse, but also echoes my personal ethos on astronomical outreach, working as an antidote to the excessive usage of CGI in space documentaries and news reports.

My involvement started back in 2009, when the film existed under the original moniker of OUTSIDE IN. I was approached by Stephen van Vuuren—director, executive producer, and all-round technical whiz—who enquired whether I’d like to contribute some imagery to the project. I readily agreed, and duly supplied him with my scant offerings of a few Saturn mosaics, and other assorted Cassini color composites.

Fast forward four years: having reconnected with the project—now retitled In Saturn's Rings (ISR)—I was hard at work compiling a color time-lapse movie of Jupiter, originally captured by the approaching Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979. (With over 3,300 color composites to be assembled semi-autonomously, it was indeed a somewhat arduous task.) In so doing, I’d proudly attained the position of one of the film’s many contributing ‘digital artists’.

A TITAN-IC UNDERTAKING

Titan was a key talking point in some the the earliest online exchanges between In Saturn's Rings maestro Stephen Van Vuuren and producer-to-be Dr. Mike Malaksa. The question was this: how could the giant moon be elevated from its also-ran status as one of the film’s supporting artists, to a prominent spot at the top of the bill?

Dr. Mike set the ball rolling by sourcing images suitable for a potential animated descent to Titan's surface. While these early communications set the scene for a putative Titan sequence, no one could have predicted how this segment would eventually consume a considerable chunk of the film’s running time, relegating a planned Apollo segment to the virtual cutting room floor.

In early 2014, while I was still up to my eyeballs in Jupiter imagery, ISR producer Val Klavans approached me for assistance with an embryonic and problematic portion of the film: a virtual photo-animated flyover of Titan. Due to Val’s other responsibilities (chiefly her tireless promotion of the project on every tentacle of social media imaginable), the job of devising a ground track for this flyover fell into my lap by little more than dumb luck.

I rapidly learned this ‘whistle-stop’ tour of Titan had several stringent requirements, as outlined specifically by Stephen VV. They were as follows:

Having consulted maps outlining the available high-resolution radar coverage of Titan (as of early 2014), in conjunction with a shortlist of surface features identified by ISR producer Dr. Mike Malaksa, I sketched out a rough ground track. The virtual camera would embark on its journey from a vantage point high above the hydrocarbon sea of Mare Ligeia, before swooping over a variety of terrain, traversing the farthest extremes of both latitude and longitude, via an almost contiguous path of 15 radar swathes.