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More recently, especially in science-fiction content, the Moon has been called by the Latin name Luna, presumably on the analogy of the Latin names of the planets, or by association with the adjectival form lunar, or a need to differentiate it from other moons that may be present in a fictional setting.
For instance, for a large portion of names ending in -s, the oblique stem and therefore the English adjective changes the -s to a -d, -t, or -r, as in Mars–Martian, Pallas–Palladian and Ceres–Cererian; [note 1] occasionally an -n has been lost historically from the nominative form, and reappears in the oblique and therefore in the English ...
The Roman numbering system arose with the very first discovery of natural satellites other than Earth's: Galileo referred to the Galilean moons as I through IV (counting from Jupiter outward), in part to spite his rival Simon Marius, who had proposed the names now adopted, after his own proposal to name the bodies after members of the Medici ...
[1] Since the invention of the telescope, astronomers have given names to the surface features they have discerned, especially on the Moon and Mars. To found an authority on planetary nomenclature, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was organized in 1919 to designate and standardize names for features on Solar System bodies. [2]
Irregular moons are probably minor planets that have been captured from surrounding space. Most irregular moons are less than 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) in diameter. The earliest published discovery of a moon other than Earth's was by Galileo Galilei, who discovered the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. Over the following three ...
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Two of the new moons orbit in the same direction as the planet rotates, which requires a name that ends in -a; the other three travel in the opposite direction and will be given names that end in ...
In mid 2016, a large addon pack project called Celestia Origin was created, which replaces all vanilla textures and graphics with higher-quality renderings, adds more minor objects such as TNOs and asteroids, while also adding more extrasolar planets with custom textures, more nebulae with full 3D and accurate models, more stars and galaxies ...