Sky & Telescope - August 12, 2009
There's an old saying that describes the weather in Maine as "9 months of wintah, and 3 months of damn poor sleddin'." But even the hardiest Mainer would be challenged by the climate on Saturn's big moon Titan, where "wintah" lasts 7½ years, temperatures struggle to reach -290°F (-178°C), the ground is rock-hard water ice, and a mix of liquid methane and ethane rains from the sky.
...
An observing team led by Emily Schaller (University of Hawaii) and Henry Roe (Lowell Observatory) has been keeping very close tabs on Titan's weather. In fact, Schaller's Caltech doctoral thesis hinged on analyzing the moon's long-term climatic characteristics. Using a sensitive spectrometer with NASA's 3-meter Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, the team set up a long-running "storm watch" — 138 nights over 2.2 years — for signs of sporadic methane-cloud buildups, as had occurred in 1995 and 2004. Whenever it looked like a storm might be brewing, the observers switched to an infrared imager on the much larger Gemini North telescope, also on Mauna Kea.
...