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a query for you astronomical types
Apr. 19th, 2012 02:32 pmDoes Earth's moon have a proper name?
Varying cultures have differing names for the planets and their satellites, but due to English being predominant or whatever, we're generally attuned to using Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc. etc. as the recognizable names of the planets. Likewise, each planet's moons have proper names - Europa, Io, etc. etc. Hell, even our planet has a proper name - Earth. And the sun is known as many things, but I've seen Sol a few times in my life, enough to make it a partial answer on that score. (Though to be fair, our system only has the one sun of any note, so it's less a question than the moon thing.)
Think about it - we just call ours "the moon." But other planets have moons. There are many moons in our solar system. So what's our moon's name? Is it Luna? Because I've never seen that used in any astronomical literature. And yes, I know all our astronomical bodies probably have numeric designations for science - but I mean a NAME for the moon. (And you can't really just say "Moon" either, because it's not written out capitalized. Plus, the other moons are also called moons ... okay, I've said that already.)
Varying cultures have differing names for the planets and their satellites, but due to English being predominant or whatever, we're generally attuned to using Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc. etc. as the recognizable names of the planets. Likewise, each planet's moons have proper names - Europa, Io, etc. etc. Hell, even our planet has a proper name - Earth. And the sun is known as many things, but I've seen Sol a few times in my life, enough to make it a partial answer on that score. (Though to be fair, our system only has the one sun of any note, so it's less a question than the moon thing.)
Think about it - we just call ours "the moon." But other planets have moons. There are many moons in our solar system. So what's our moon's name? Is it Luna? Because I've never seen that used in any astronomical literature. And yes, I know all our astronomical bodies probably have numeric designations for science - but I mean a NAME for the moon. (And you can't really just say "Moon" either, because it's not written out capitalized. Plus, the other moons are also called moons ... okay, I've said that already.)
