Naming the moon

I've been told I have a love affair with the moon. And I believe it. Mars comes to its closest approach tonight, in less than an hour from now, and I'm asking my wife what she thinks the moon should be named. She suggests something Japanese.

Actually I did try to take a picture of Mars tonight, during a rare break in the clouds. Results unsatisfactory. More to come later.

In the meantime I've started a thread at the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today forums, asking for suggestions on naming the moon. I'd love to hear your opinion.

And do I have a name for the moon? None. Not yet.

A photograph I took on August 25th, probably the best I have:

Comments

beche-la-mer said…
Kevin, That's really nice, though upside down.

If we name the moon, oughtn't we to name the earth as well?
October 31, 2005 11:49 PM
Kevin Rosero said…
Yes, and we should name the sun, too. In Spanish we already have la Tierra, la Luna, and el Sol; and I know every culture will always have its names for these things. But it would be interesting if the whole world could give input on the question of the official astronomical names.
November 01, 2005 8:27 PM
Jennifer R. said…
Hi, I just ran across your blog by accident and thought I'd let you know how I enjoy it.

I'm a college student with a casual interest in astronomy, but I'm not a science major, so I'm not generally smart enough to intelligently comment, I don't think. :)

But as for naming the moon...I have always been a fan of the mythological names for various astronomical objects. (I'm a classics major, so it figures.) It would seem apropriate to me to name the moon Diana, since as a goddess she was so strongly identified with the moon. Whatever we name it, I think the name should embody the femininity and mystery that is archetypally associated with it.
November 02, 2005 11:29 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Googolplex

Image
Time to laugh a little. The googolplex is a famous number so large that it cannot be written out in a conventional manner. The number of digits in a googolplex exceeds the space available to put them in, even if you printed each digit at the size of an atom and used all the space in the known universe. A googolplex is unimaginably larger than a googol, which can be written out as a 1 followed by a hundred zeroes, or 10 to the power of 100. Let me write that out (with some help from cutting and pasting): 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Another way to write it out is as 10 to the power of 100, which is 10 multiplied by itself in a string that includes a hundred instances of "10". 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x
Read more

The Conjunction Project

Image
For those who remember the Moon-Venus-Jupiter conjunction of September 2005, this will be a treat: below I've collected a few links to photos of that event as seen over the course of four days from various places around the world. 111 links to be precise, from 96 photographers in 21 countries. I've organized the links so that you can check out the photos in roughly the order that they were taken. As the Earth turned in an eastwardly direction, photographers farther to the west got to see the conjunction when dusk fell on their part of their world. So the links are ordered according to the longitudes of the photographers (to the best of my information). This does not produce an exact chronological order, as I discuss in the essay that follows, but it suffices to give a sense of the Moon moving across the sky in its monthlong orbit around the Earth. On each of the four days of the conjunction, the Moon appears in a new place with relation to Jupiter and Venus, as in the two phot
Read more

Pleiades eclipsed

Image
Through a cloudy sky, I got a few brief glimpses tonight of the Moon passing over the stars of the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters). This is a snapshot at 7:27 pm New York time, with Alcyone, the brightest of the cluster, only 27 minutes before the moon's dark limb caught up to it and covered it. Very close to the moon, near the lower left of the lunar disk and much dimmer than Alcyone, is a star called Maia. This shot at 8:34 p.m. captures, going counterclockwise from the star closest to the Moon's limb, Merope, Electra, Taygeta and Maia. Alcyone was then behind the Moon. Finally, this shot at 8:56 captures Alcyone hanging above the Moon's bright limb like a rocket taking off from the lunar surface, just two minutes after the star reappeared on that side. Before tonight I had never seen a star at the instant that it "winked" out and got eclipsed, or watched one while it winked back into view. Tonight I did get to see one such event, through murky clouds almost dark e
Read more