Titan, I learn, was discovered by Christiaan Huygens in 1655, but it was only named Titan much later, in 1847, by a Sir John Herschel. Seeing the surface of Titan today is additionally amusing because of a strange hoax in 1835 that concerned Herschel and the surface of our own moon.
In 1835 the New York Sun published a series of articles reporting astronomical discoveries made through a huge new telescope that allowed the detailed examination of the moon's surface. Among the features observed was a basaltic rock outcropping:
"Its color was a greenish brown, and the width of the columns, as defined by their interstices on the canvass, was invariably twenty-eight inches. No fracture whatever appeared in the mass first presented, but in a few seconds a shelving pile appeared of five or six columns width, which showed their figure to be hexagonal, and their articulations similar to those of the basaltic formation at Staffa."But far more astonishing even than this close-up of stuðlaberg or even the poppies seen to grow nearby it were the bison, the society of bipedal beavers, the bat-winged humans, blue unicorns and other animate wonders that also graced the variable lunar landscape of vermillion hills and sandy shores and cavorted before the eye of the gaping astronomer at his lens.
The gaping astronomer and maker of these astounding discoveries was identified in the articles as none other than Sir John Herschel. Herschel had of course made no such discoveries; he was also apparently blissfully unaware of the articles until someone showed them to him. The true author of the Great Moon Hoax was someone else entirely, probably a Richard Adams Locke, though he never wholly admitted it.
Locke died in 1871, but I wonder what he would have thought of Titan's orange plains and misty shorelines.
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