Once Huygens' mother ship, Cassini, had beamed information from the probe back to radio receivers on Earth on Friday 14 January, the raw images were posted on the descent-imaging team's website, based at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Computer enthusiasts pounced on the images immediately, and improved them using a range of free or commercially available software before swapping their pictures in Internet chatrooms.

"When we started looking at the raw images, there were marvellous things there that we wanted to share," says Anthony Liekens, a chatroom enthusiast from Borsbeek, Belgium.

When Liekens tuned into the ESA press conference on the morning of Saturday 15 January, he was disappointed by the quality of their images. So he decided to host amateur compositions on his website. The site has quickly turned into a virtual gallery.

The referenced page: http://anthony.liekens.net/huygens_static.html

Amateurs beat space agencies to Titan pictures