Discovery of Titan

Titan was discovered by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who used a refracting telescope he had built with his brother Constantijn. It was the first moon found around Saturn and only the second planetary moon discovered after Galileo's finds at Jupiter. It is the largest moon of Saturn and the second largest in the solar system, bigger than the planet Mercury, and it is the only moon known with a thick atmosphere, made mostly of nitrogen. The name Titan was suggested much later, in the nineteenth century, by John Herschel. In 2005 the Huygens probe, carried by the Cassini spacecraft, landed on its surface and revealed rivers and lakes of liquid methane and ethane.

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