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The adjectival forms of the names of astronomical bodies are not always easily predictable. Attested adjectival forms of the larger bodies are listed below, along with the two small Martian moons; in some cases they are accompanied by their demonymic equivalents, which denote hypothetical inhabitants of these bodies.
In the early days, only a very limited number of features could be seen on other Solar System bodies other than the Moon. Craters on the Moon could be observed with even some of the earliest telescopes, and 19th-century telescopes could make out some features on Mars. Jupiter had its famous Great Red Spot, also visible through early telescopes.
Exceptions to this rule are valleys and craters on Mars and Venus; naming conventions for these features differ according to size. One feature classification, regio, was originally used on early maps of the Moon and Mercury (drawn from telescopic observations) to describe vague albedo features. It is now used to delineate a broad geographic region.
The Venus symbol was also used in Western alchemy representing the element copper (like the symbol of Mercury is also the symbol of the element mercury), [284] [285] and since polished copper has been used for mirrors from antiquity the symbol for Venus has sometimes been called Venus mirror, representing the mirror of the goddess, although ...
Lunar: 1,624 craters (31.2%) Venusian: 900 craters (17.3%) Mercurian: 397 craters (7.6%) Martian: 1,092 craters (21.0%) Others: 1,198 craters (23.0%) Distribution of named craters in the Solar System as of 2017. [a] This is a list of craters on Venus, named by the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. All craters on Venus are named after ...
Because its orbit takes it between the Earth and the Sun, Venus as seen from Earth exhibits visible phases in much the same manner as the Earth's Moon. Galileo Galilei observed the phases of Venus in December 1610, an observation which supported Copernicus's then-contentious heliocentric description of the Solar System.
Every human language has its own word for the Earth's Moon, and these words are the ones normally used in astronomical contexts.However, a number of fanciful or mythological names for the Moon have been used in the context of astronomy (an even larger number of lunar epithets have been used in non-astronomical contexts).
The object was seen by many other astronomers over a large period of time: by James Short in 1740, [4] by Andreas Mayer in 1759, [4] by Louis Lagrange in 1761, [5] another eighteen observations in 1761, including one in which a small spot was seen following Venus while the planet was in a transit across the Sun, eight observations in 1764, and ...