Celestia Forums

Important announcement for people who like minor moons... More of them have names now!

The IAU recently announced the new designations for many new moons discovered in the last few years.

I guess these ones should be moving from numberedmoons.ssc into minormoons.ssc in the Celestia CVS tree... (that's your job Grant isn't it?)

Here are the changes anyway (some are pretty odd IMO...):

Newly Named Satellites of Jupiter:
S/2001 J 1 - - - Autonoe
S/2001 J 2 - - - Thyone
S/2001 J 3 - - - Hermippe
S/2001 J11 - - - Aitne
S/2001 J 4 - - - Eurydome
S/2001 J 7 - - - Euanthe
S/2001 J10 - - - Euporie
S/2001 J 9 - - - Orthosie
S/2001 J 5 - - - Sponde
S/2001 J 8 - - - Kale
S/2001 J 6 - - - Pasithee


Newly Named Satellites of Saturn:
S/2000 S 1 - - - Ymir
S/2000 S 2 - - - Paaliaq
S/2000 S 4 - - - Tarvos
S/2000 S 6 - - - Ijiraq
S/2000 S12 - - - Suttung
S/2000 S 5 - - - Kiviuq
S/2000 S 9 - - - Mundilfari
S/2000 S11 - - - Albiorix
S/2000 S 8 - - - Skadi
S/2000 S10 - - - Erriapo
S/2000 S 3 - - - Siarnaq
S/2000 S 7 - - - Thrym


Newly Named Satellite of Uranus:
S/2001 U 1 - - - Trinculo

I've updated my tiny moons file to take account of the changes, and you can get it from the Other xyz's & ssc's page on my site http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/ (i've also removed ALL moons overlapping with the standard minormoons.ssc file.)

JackHiggins wrote:(that's your job Grant isn't it?)

More of a hobby than a job ...
Where did you get the information from, Jack? It hasn't even appeared on the IAU website yet.

Grant

It hasn't even appeared on the IAU website yet.

You know I actually forgot to look at their site... I reckoned that if sky & telescope magazine http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1012_1.asp had the news it would definitely be on the IAU so i never bothered to look... (People were discussing this on badastronomy.com forums that's where I got the link)

I doubt if they'd invent 24 such strange names just for a story though, so you'll probably see this news around on other sites soon too...

The IAU's naming schemes are getting bloody confusing now... the satellites of Saturn are supposed to be named after Greek Titans, and now they're naming them after Norse gods?

Really, if there's going to be such a total lack of consistency, they might as well stop pretending to have a naming scheme and just name them after whatever they want...

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:The IAU's naming schemes are getting bloody confusing now... the satellites of Saturn are supposed to be named after Greek Titans, and now they're naming them after Norse gods

I think they're probably running out of Greek Titans, and have expanded the catchment area with their multi-cultural remit in mind. The Norse Ymir Thrym and Skadi I recognize as giants who interacted with the gods - so Norse Titans, in a sense. There's some Inuit in there, too, by the look of it, and at least one Celt.

Grant