The Weather Page

No matter how bad the weather gets in Baltimore, it's an evening in Tahiti compared with Titan, Saturn's largest moon. A paper in the journal Science last week described a global overcast of frozen methane clouds, floating atop an atmosphere of mostly nitrogen. Clouds of ethane (a component of natural gas) drift near the poles. Mornings bring a drizzle of liquid methane off methane oceans and onto the foothills of the moon's main continent, Xanadu. The day's high? A chilly minus-297 Fahrenheit.