Geological and Geographical Features On Planets and Satellites
In addition to naming planets and satellites themselves, the individual geological and geographical features (craters, mountains, volcanoes and so forth) on those planets and satellites also need to be named.
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 though early telescopes.
In 1919 the IAU was formed, and it appointed a committee to regularize the chaotic lunar and Martian nomenclatures then current. Much of the work was done by Mary Adela Blagg, and the report Named Lunar Formations by Blagg and Muller (1935), was the first systematic listing of lunar nomenclature. Later, "The System of Lunar Craters, quadrants I, II, III, IV" was published, under the direction of Gerard P. Kuiper. These works were adopted by the IAU and became the recognized sources for lunar nomenclature.
The Martian nomenclature was clarified in 1958, when a committee of the IAU recommended for adoption the names of 128 albedo features (bright, dark, or colored) observed through ground-based telescopes (IAU, 1960). These names were based on a system of nomenclature developed in the late 19th century by the Italian astronomer Giovanni V. Schiaparelli (1879) and expanded in the early 20th century by Eugene M. Antoniadi (1929), a Greek-born astronomer working at Meudon, France.
However, the age of space probes brought high-resolution images of various solar system bodies, and it became necessary to propose naming standards for the features seen on them.
Read more about this topic: Astronomical Naming Conventions
Famous quotes containing the words geological, geographical, features, planets and/or satellites:
“The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men’s thinkings run laterally, never vertically.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“While you are divided from us by geographical lines, which are imaginary, and by a language which is not the same, you have not come to an alien people or land. In the realm of the heart, in the domain of the mind, there are no geographical lines dividing the nations.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.”
—Iris Murdoch (b. 1919)
“To the Japanese, Portugal and Russia are neutral enemies, England and America are belligerent enemies, and Germany and her satellites are friendly enemies. They draw very fine distinctions.”
—Jerome Cady, U.S. screenwriter, and Lewis Milestone. Peter Voroshevski (Howard Clinton?)