An interactive globe of Saturn's largest moon, textured with the Cassini ISS 938 nm global surface mosaic — the wavelength at which the haze is thin enough to see the ground. All 304 IAU-adopted names are selectable, from the hydrocarbon seas of the north to the equatorial dune fields, together with the Huygens landing site; the research feed is retrieved at run time.
The sphere is rendered in Three.js at Titan's volumetric mean radius, 2574.76 km (IAU 2015), scaled to scene units. The base layer is the Cassini ISS global mosaic at 938 nm, 4.005 km/px — a methane window, the narrow band in which the atmospheric haze is thin enough for the surface to be imaged from orbit at all. What the map shows is therefore surface albedo at one wavelength, and its contrast is dominated by the equatorial dune fields, which read dark, against the bright dissected highlands. Relief is offered but has no measured source: the 2015 product assumes a spherical Titan because no global control network accompanied it, Cassini RADAR altimetry covers only narrow strips, and no global DEM has been published. With relief enabled the page derives a bump map from 938 nm brightness, which encodes albedo seen through haze rather than height. Textures are read from Data/worlds/titan/.
Named features are the complete IAU set drawn from the USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature via Data/worlds/titan/features.json: 304 records across 23 classes — the three maria and 93 lacūs of the northern polar hydrocarbon seas and lakes, the sinūs and freta that indent them, the undae dune fields of the equator, the labyrinthi, the twelve known craters, and the great albedo features Xanadu, Shangri-La, Senkyo and Belet. To these is added the Huygens landing site, the one place where any spacecraft has measured Titan's surface directly; its position comes from DISR descent imaging and it carries no IAU name. A catalogue centre is not a coastline, a mapped outline, or a guarantee that the named form is resolved at 938 nm. The research panel queries body_server.py at /api/titan/latest for current Titan literature (NASA ADS, with OpenAlex and arXiv as fallbacks); a per-feature endpoint returns recent papers on the selected feature. Absent a server, the seed research.json and ADS search links are substituted. Engine, server and schema are shared with the Mercury, Venus and Moon globes.
Markers use the east-positive convention of the IAU, converted on ingest from the Gazetteer's positive-west publication. The longitude registration of the mosaic was measured rather than assumed, using the albedo features whose sign is unambiguous. Sampling six bright regions (Xanadu, Tsegihi, Quivira, Dilmun, Adiri, Fensal) against six dark ones (Belet, Senkyo, Aztlan, Shangri-La, Aaru, Mezzoramia) separates the four possible mirror-and-offset combinations by 67 DN in favour of one of them: Xanadu reads 184 and Belet 28. That combination puts the image left edge at 0°E, so lonOffsetDeg is 180. Xanadu (15°S, 100°W) and the dune field Belet (5°S, 105°E) are the visual registration checks.
Titan is highlighted in cyan on a live map of the uniquely-named solar-system bodies — planets, dwarf planets, named asteroids and comets — with the interstellar objects and escaping spacecraft, each at its current position and linked to its source.
body_server.py