Celestia Forums

What's this with the moons being numbered from the inside out, like Moon = Earth 1, Phobos= Mars 1 etc?

Saw it first on Fridgers globular clusters build, since I didn't use the SVN builds before. And then took a look at the SSC in SourceForge and it is there too.

I don't know what I should think of that, just take a look at the Enter/name/Enter method for Saturn, looks clogged and you don't have a clue, what moon you will select.
So I don't see ANY benefit of this at the moment. If someone could explain it perhaps to me what the use of it is?
Especially, as it gets lost, once you have done the following

Enter/ Saturn/

Then you see the normal moon names for Saturn, okay I didn't go through them all, so perhaps they are still in.

Another thought that just occured to me: If I use the Enter/name/Enter method while orbiting the sun for example then I can choose with "Enter/Saturn I/Enter" a Saturnian moon without going through the hierarchy. By this I mean for eample "Enter/Saturn/name of moon/Enter" as in 1.5.1.

That whole behaviour seems very strange to me. And what happens if they find a new new moon in between the known ones? And are they numbered following their distance from the planet or what?

So please explain to me the advantages of this or why it is necessary.

A confused Guckytos

Guckytos wrote:What's this with the moons being numbered from the inside out, like Moon = Earth 1, Phobos= Mars 1 etc?

Saw it first on Fridgers globular clusters build, since I didn't use the SVN builds before. And then took a look at the SSC in SourceForge and it is there too.

I don't know what I should think of that, just take a look at the Enter/name/Enter method for Saturn, looks clogged and you don't have a clue, what moon you will select.
So I don't see ANY benefit of this at the moment. If someone could explain it perhaps to me what the use of it is?

The moons of the outer planets had designations like Saturn VI long before they acquired widely-recognized proper names. Some literature still refers to the satellites by these old names, though it appears to be increasingly uncommon. It's can be useful to see the correlation between the modern names and the historical ones, which is I presume why Grant added them to solarsys.ssc once the capability to have multiple names for solar system object was introduced.

Especially, as it gets lost, once you have done the following

Enter/ Saturn/

Then you see the normal moon names for Saturn, okay I didn't go through them all, so perhaps they are still in.

Another thought that just occured to me: If I use the Enter/name/Enter method while orbiting the sun for example then I can choose with "Enter/Saturn I/Enter" a Saturnian moon without going through the hierarchy. By this I mean for eample "Enter/Saturn/name of moon/Enter" as in 1.5.1.

You would rather it be Sol/Saturn/I instead of Solar/Saturn/Saturn I? I think it would be confusing to pollute the solar system name space with a bunch of roman numerals.

That whole behaviour seems very strange to me. And what happens if they find a new new moon in between the known ones? And are they numbered following their distance from the planet or what?

The numbers used to be assigned by distance, but the continuing discovery of new moons meant that the numbering had to be frozen to avoid confusion. According to its Wikipedia article, Titan has remained Saturn VI since 1789, despite the discovery of many inner moons since that date.

--Chris

These are official designators, which each moon acquires at the same time as it gets a name. They replace the temporary designators assigned at discovery, and they're assigned in chronological order of naming. So Saturn's moon Thrymr is Saturn XXX (the thirtieth to acquire a name) and was S/2000 S 7 (the 7th provisional satellite of Saturn detected in 2000).
You can find the current list of permanent designators from the IAU here.

Grant

Hi grant,

thanks for the explanation. I wasn't aware of that.

Perhpas we should add this link to the permanant designators also to the documentation.

Best regards,

Guckytos