On This Day In History: Christiaan Huygens Discovers Saturn’s Largest Moon Titan – On Mar 25, 1655

AncientPages.com - On March 25, 1655, a Dutch amateur astronomer, Christiaan Huygens, discovered Saturn's satellite Titan, named for its grand size (half that of the Earth's) and thought to be the largest moon in our solar system thanks to its extended atmosphere.

In 1655 Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch amateur astronomer discovered Saturn's satellite Titan.

Born in 1629, Huygens came from a wealthy and well-connected Dutch family; he studied mathematics and law at the University of Leiden and later went to the College of Breda.

With his brother Constantijn, Christiaan applied himself to the manufacture of telescopes and developed a telescope theory.

Huygens discovered the law of refraction to derive the focal distance of lenses. He also realized how to optimize his telescopes by using a new way of grinding and polishing the lenses.

On this day in 1655, he pointed one of his new telescopes toward Saturn, intending to study its rings. But he was startled that the planet also had a large moon besides the rings.

Today we know that this celestial body as Titan.

Titan, Saturn's largest satellite, is a mysterious world we are beginning to explore seriously in-depth, thanks to the Cassini-Huygens mission after a 7.5-year trek through our solar system.

The Huygens mission had its most tremendous success when it descended through Titan's atmosphere on January 14, 2005.

The combined orbiter and probe investigations have contributed with a fantastic description of Titan's atmosphere and surface, returning outstanding new data whose analysis has revealed a wonderful world, similar to our planet yet ten times further away from our Sun.

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