Size Comparism Of The Moons Of The Gas Planets, Moon Systems of the gas giants compared Options

[Guest_spaceffm_*]

edited out

[Bill Harris]

I always had a mental image of the Galilean satellites as being larger; seeing them compared to our Moon, they look like rather mundane rock/ice/sulfur balls.

Don't worrry about bringing up the copyright issue; as imagers/photographers many of us have been affected by mis-use incidents, so thatis a collective "short fuse".

--Bill

[David]

I always had a mental image of the Galilean satellites as being larger; seeing them compared to our Moon, they look like rather mundane rock/ice/sulfur balls.

Well, they are large: just not particularly large in comparison with Earth. But the Earth is big, something we're disposed to forget when we've been told so often just how small and insignificant we are -- it's the largest terrestrial planet, and the biggest thing in the Solar System that isn't a star or a 'gas giant'. By the way, it occurs to me that, although I am used to thinking of Uranus and Neptune as miniature Jupiters, they are -- in both size and structure -- almost as different from Jupiter and Saturn as they are from Earth.

I think mundane is a good word for objects of this size, though; mundanus in Latin means "of or relating to the world", and they are worlds in themselves, even if not big ones. Maybe the IAU guys who are coming up with classifications for the solar system can employ a category, "mundane objects".