Printable Version of Topic

Posted by: Jeffrey Mar 3 2009, 02:20 PM

(Since we have Jovian for the Jupiter system, I'm assuming Hermean, Venerian, Arean and Chronian are the proper adjectives for the rest of the planets. I think, though, that "Poseidian" is a bit much and "Uranus" is basically the same word in Greek and Latin [Ouranos vs. Uranus.] Even "Venerian" isn't entirely correct, but it's either that or "Aphroditan. )


As you may have guessed, my interest in planetary maps has peaked again, and I think it's time to update all my Voyager-sourced maps. The question is, should I buy the latest USGS maps of Mimas, Iapetus, Enceladus, Dione, etc. or are new maps coming anytime soon?

Posted by: Phil Stooke Mar 3 2009, 02:54 PM

Nobody agrees on the adjectives and most people try to structure a sentence so an adjective is not needed. "Map of Mimas" rather than "Mimosian map". We can now map well over 60 worlds - do you really want to remember 60 obscure adjectives? (I know, you were only referring to planets...) You mention Venus - Cytherian was used for a while by some people. It comes from one of the other names for Venus. I think Venereal sounds better, but it's already taken.

USGS is not producing the most current maps - they may later - but DLR in Germany is doing a lot of that work now. Their maps are on the Cassini website and the Photojournal if you explore a bit. Google will take you there.

Phil

Posted by: Jeffrey Mar 3 2009, 03:20 PM

"I can't take my mind off Venus. It's like I have some disease. A Venereal disease!

Posted by: illexsquid Apr 29 2009, 01:02 AM

Sorry to wander off-topic, but....

"Jovian" is from Jovis, the Latin genitive form of Jupiter, not the Greek name (which would of course be Ζεύς or Zeus). The same is true for Venerian (not venereal... tsk, tsk) and Martian. The forms Mercurian, Saturnian, Uranian and Neptunian work just fine, being formed in more or less the same way. Besides, Cronian means of the Klingon homeworld (ducks and runs for cover).

Anyway, as for maps: I still have my collection of hard-copy maps of the planets and moons from the eighties that I got as a kid and will keep forever. I regard them as historic, the first maps of these worlds, but yes, they are out-of-date. I did recently stumble across the http://geopubs.wr.usgs.gov/docs/wrgis/astro.html of I- maps (geologic investigation maps, the category under which they published the Voyager-based maps), but if you look under planetary maps you'll note that they stop at Jupiter. (They have nice new maps of all the Galileans except Io, available as PDFs.) However, the only Saturn maps I've found are the rough photomosaics available on the http://ciclops.org page; most don't even have nomenclature attached. I suppose you could put it there yourself and make a decent map, but I'm hoping at some point the USGS makes nice new maps of the Saturnian satellites (and also Mercury). Back in the Voyager era I was, as mentioned, just a kid, so I called the USGS in Flagstaff and asked them; I think I got put on the phone with the late Hal Mazursky. IIRC he told me it would be about 18 months after they got all the data from the Voyager encounters. So if the USGS even plans on publishing new Saturn maps, I'll bet they'll wait until "all" the data are in, and who knows when they'll judge that to be. Any opinions?

In the meantime, there are also PDFs available at the http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/jsp/SystemSearch2.jsp?System=Saturn. And Google gave me http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/images/mimas_comp.pdf, though it's not listed. Hope this helps.

Posted by: Greg Hullender Apr 29 2009, 05:54 PM

Oh no! Another linguistic discussion!

As a real linguist, I’m not going to try to say what’s “correct” and what’s not, but just looking at the specific problem of the English genitive of “Venus” it’s pretty clear that “venusian” dominates in actual usage – by far.

To test this, I did a quick search of all titles in the UW library for all three terms. I found 269 with “venusian” in the title, 6 with “cytherian” and only one with “venerean” (and that one isn’t about the planet).

To usefully tie this back to UMSF, let me suggest that captions of pictures posted to the web should use “venusian” (even though it’s a barbarism) simply because that is the term that scientists and lay people alike will be putting into search engines. Anything meant to be found on the web simply can’t ignore a 269-to-1 usage ratio.

Posted by: Yadgar Dec 26 2014, 12:15 AM

Hi(gh)!

O.k., let's agree on "Saturnian maps"... and after being led to the http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4403 of the large icy moons at JPL by a link on povray.binaries.images (a newsgroup dedicated to the famous http://www.povray.org), I'm about to re-activate my project of a raytraced Solar System ("POVSolar") - and thus I would like to ask whether any Cassini altimetry data of the larger Saturnian moons have been made publicly accessible, regardless in which format (ASCII would be most convenient).

Currently, I'm mostly looking for altimetry data of Mimas...

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

Posted by: Bjorn Jonsson Dec 26 2014, 01:01 PM

You are probably looking for shape models/DEMs. Several of Saturn's satellites can be found here:
http://sbn.psi.edu/pds/archive/shape.html

Posted by: Yadgar Dec 26 2014, 02:47 PM

Hi(gh)!

Very intriguing! And easy to implement in POV-Ray - no conversion from geographic into cartesian coordiates but ready-made vertex and face lists! Cool!!!

See you in http://www.khyberspace.de!

Yadgar