Ebook: Titan Unveiled: Saturn's Mysterious Moon Explored

There is no shortage on science in this book, let that be the first remark on it. In every way, the authors have tried to be as meticulous (and perhaps even tedious) as they could be. But still it left me a little dissapointed. The writing is dry and at places unremarkable. It lingers on technical details that are perhaps exciting for students and engineers, but for laymen and casual readers of popular science it can be a struggle to keep attention (for those who have trouble falling asleep, I can recommend reading it in bed).
For people that dedicate large parts of their careers to undiscover a satelite, that is so elusive and mysterious to the human eye, one would hope that some of the passion that would go into that work also would poor trough the written lines of the book. Instead of that, somehow the long years, the countless studies and experiments, long nights of observing and programming have found their way though. That may be accurate and truthfull, it is also very dull at times,...well at least to me. What doesn't help either is that the bulk of images in the book are very unclear. What could be, or rather should be spectacular photographs of Titan and its neigbors are mere black and white thumbnails without any detail or explanatory capacity.

Perhaps the most remarkable chapter is the last one, where the authors speculate on how a future mission would look like. Most captivating perhaps a balloon that floats in Titans atmosphere as a platform for certain instruments. And even there they find time to go into detail about which sort of instruments and experiments could be undertaken in a very lengthy manner. But at least it gives some room to some imagination and makes investigation of Titan an exiting enterprise afterall.

The lack of more imaginative writing, is even more obvious on those places where the writers make attempts on humor. After so many pages of meandering on programming and scheduling Cassini's instruments, it fails to make a punch.

Having said all this, I do want to emphasize, that it is not badly written book. This moon of Saturn is an enigmatic place and this book does a good job of at least partialy lifting the veil it is shrouded in, where our knowledge is solid enough to make claims about its caracteristics. I just wanted it to be more lively presented.