(Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/USGS.)

Behold some 400 “lakes and seas” on Saturn's moon, Titan, as captured by the spacecraft Cassini. Rendered with the auric exuberance of Klimt and the bold angularity of Schiele, through complicated parabolas and hyperbolas, one wonders if NASA astronomers and computer scientists aren't attempting to formulate an official visual style. Instead of sci-fi realism, extraterrestrial landscapes and future colonized worlds will be illustrated in a sort of hyperdecorative post-art nouveau style. Or not.

In any case, as the above resized image does no justice to the original, you should download the full satellite composite image, either the 10MB jpeg version or the 186MB tiff version.

In the Archives:
Sugimoto in Titan