As NASA's Cassini spacecraft soared past Saturn's moon Titan, it recently caught a glimpse of bright sunlight reflecting off hydrocarbon seas. In the past, Cassini had captured, separately, views of the polar seas and the sun glinting off them, but this is the first time both have been seen together in the same view.









Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho

The sunlight was so bright that it saturated the detector on Cassini that viewed it, called the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument. The sun was about 40 degrees above the horizon of Kraken Mare then, which is the highest ever observed on Titan.