History of Grant Hutchison's "Poor Moons" for Celestia


10Sep05 update:

Complete orbital elements for S/2004 S1 - S/2004 S6 have been added to "numberedmoons.ssc" (see above) as described in "Cassini Imaging Science: Initial Results on Saturn's Rings and Small Satellites," by Porco et al. Science 25 Feb 2005. They have been removed from "poormoons.ssc"

Grant Hutchison, September 2005


31Oct05 update:

Herewith an update to poormoons.ssc, containing the new name for the Keeler Gap moon (Daphnis) and the two new provisional Plutonians, 2005P1 and 2005P2. Noteworthy that the discoverers of the latter have used Celestia to depict their orbits at http://www.boulder.swri.edu/plutonews/.

I realise that the naming of Daphnis implies there's a proper orbit for it somewhere, but so far no luck in finding it!

Grant Hutchison, October 2005


4Dec05 update:

This update includes the new names for all of the Uranians in the file. I particularly enjoy the fact that the mislaid satellite 1986 U10 has now been named "Perdita"! At revent's suggestion, I've started including a version number in the numberedmoons.ssc file, so that users can easily check if they're up to date.


28Feb06 update:

2005P1 and 2005P2 have been removed, as these now have good orbits which I've included in numberedmoons.ssc.

Grant Hutchison, February, 2006


19Oct06 update:

The attached file is a compatibility update to poormoons.ssc, removing entries for Daphnis, Perdita, Mab and Cupid, all of which now appear in numbermoons.ssc. This leaves just the entry for 2000J11 in poormoons.ssc at present. This file is compatible with numberedmoons.ssc version 1.26 and above on CVS.


18Jul07 update:

IAUC 8857 reports another moon found by the Cassini team: 2007 S4. I've added it to the attached poormoons.ssc.


01Oct07 update:

2007 S4 is now named Anthe.


04Sep08 update:

I've just revised numberedmoons.ssc to use the new multiple names option for ssc's. I've also done a couple of things of relevance to poormoons.scc:

I've moved Anthe from poormoons.ssc to numberedmoons.ssc, since it now has a good orbit. And I've moved S/2004 S 3, S/2004 S 4 and S/2004 S 6 to poormoons.ssc, since they still have not been recovered.

So poormoons.ssc now contains these three dubious Saturnians as well as the unrecovered Jovian, S/2000 J 11. It is compatible with numberedmoons.ssc as of SVN revision 4403.

See also:
The content of these Web pages was provided by Grant Hutchison.

This Web page is maintained by Selden Ball at Wilson Lab.
Please send any comments or corrections to seb@lepp.cornell.edu