Visible in the early-morning sky today, Saturn’s two-toned moon Iapetus reaches superior conjunction just 1.4′ due south of Saturn. The proximity makes the now-11th-magnitude moon easier to find, as ...

Summer nights offer lots of interesting sights this month. Mercury and Mars are on show in the evening twilight. Both Uranus ...

Iapetus is the third-largest moon orbiting Saturn, with a diameter of 914 miles (1,471.2 km). Although its radius is about two-fifths that of Earth's moon, its icy composition means that it is ...

Saturn's two-faced moon Iapetus reaches its greatest western elongation today. At western elongation, the moon's lighter hemisphere is turned toward Earth, making it brightest and easiest to view ...

Iapetus: the facts. Discovered by Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Date of discovery 1671. Diameter 892 miles (1436 km) ... In Greek mythology Iapetus was a Titan, the son of Uranus, ...

Named formally after the Greek mythological Titan, Iapetus is sometimes referred to as the “painted,” or “yin-yang” moon, due to puzzling variations in its surface composition.

Iapetus. Left-hand panel ... Titan's atmosphere is dominated by the inert gas nitrogen — also the major component of Earth's air—but it gets its distinctive color, opaque haze, ...

Nearly every particle larger than 10 microns across will end up on Iapetus, the team concludes. Smaller particles that miss Iapetus strike the Saturn moons Titan and Hyperion.

The dark material on Iapetus is thought to have hailed from elsewhere, notes Radebaugh, who was not involved in the research. So it’s plausible that Titan’s sands could have otherworldly ...

Titan experiences changing seasons very similar to those on our planet, though its year is 29.5 Earth years. Temperatures at the winter pole seem to favor rainfall, so the lakes migrate from one ...

Saturn’s two-faced moon Iapetus reaches its greatest western elongation today. At western elongation, the moon’s lighter hemisphere is turned toward Earth, making it brightest and easiest to ...