
Moons of all the planets in our solar system - mooreds
https://www.go-astronomy.com/planets/planet-moons.htm
======
mLuby
I'm surprised we haven't seen more hard sci-fi in the jovian or cronian
systems. While constant 1g acceleration drives open the whole solar system to
the ~month travel time that benefits stories, much more realistic
accelerations (or limited fuel) can still manage the same within those
systems. Add to that the plethora of interesting moons, rings, and
gravitational points to focus people and material around and the action should
flow quite naturally.

See The Expanse Season 2 (it's _amazing_ ).

~~~
georgeecollins
The books are great and the TV series is now on Amazon Prime, with future
seasons coming. Anybody on HN ought to be watching it.

~~~
narag
_... the TV series is now on Amazon Prime, with future seasons coming._

Fortunately Amazon took it. If after three seasons of slow development it
ended where we start to see answers, I would have considered it a scam. Not so
insulting as Gallactica, but definitely annoying.

------
cgriswald
There is a comment on the site that the Galilean Moons of Jupiter can be seen
with the naked eye under dark skies. I've known people who might have eyes
good enough to do that, but for the rest of us even a modest pair of
binoculars is enough. To me, it's one of the funnest things you can view in
the northern hemisphere without getting out more serious equipment. (Another
would be the Orion nebula. If you can set the exposure on your camera, you can
even photograph it, although without tracking it'll be blurry.)

~~~
maxxxxx
Wasn't Galileo first to observe them with his telescope or were they mentioned
somewhere before? I assume back then the skies were darker and people probably
had better eyes so if they are observable I would assume somebody would have
mentioned them.

~~~
cgriswald
There are a few confounding factors:

1\. Jupiter is very bright.

2\. The moons aren't always visible (they're behind or crossing Jupiter).

3\. The magnitude of the moons changes with the relative positions of Earth
and Jupiter.

It's possible that Galileo was not the first to see them, but if you don't
know what they are or how you managed to see them, you're probably not going
to be able to get anyone else to believe you. The telescope allowed Galileo to
track their movement and also to convince others, who could also look through
a telescope and see them easily.

------
gavinpc
If you want to play with this data, it's available in various formats [1]

I happened to use this last week because we needed test data for a community
tree in an app we're building. There are nine communities, and we needed test
cases with 0, 1, and many subcommunities. This not only provided ready test
cases, but the team is learning celestial facts while working on the feature!

[1] [https://devstronomy.com/#/datasets](https://devstronomy.com/#/datasets)

------
flurdy
Very nice summary of the moons. I showed it to my kids.

Though I was surprised to find a scientific astronomy related page using
inches and Fahrenheit units.

Though I guess the target audience it has been made for is perhaps US based
school kids, but the page works really well for anyone across the world.

------
raz32dust
It's interesting to note that there is no well-defined lower limit on the size
of what can be called a moon. So I can call a dust particle a moon as well.

------
foolfoolz
Whenever people say they were born too late to explore the earth or too young
to explore space i dont understand it. Something like 90% of the objects in
our solar system have been discovered in the last ~15 years. There's tons more
out there. Sure the major planets and their moons are here, but you scroll to
the bottom of this list there's unconfirmed dwarf planets. And likely moons of
them as well

~~~
mixmastamyk
The last trip to Pluto reminded me of being a kid again, when I pored over the
newspaper looking at Voyager's trips to the gas giants.

------
billfruit
Is any of the moons in solar system having smaller moons orbiting them?

~~~
zipwitch
While not exactly the sub-moon you're looking for there are some interesting
objects that come close.

Co-orbital moons, like Saturn's Janus and Epimetheus, are moons that are in
stable orbit-swapping configurations. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-
orbital_configuration#Co-or...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-
orbital_configuration#Co-orbital_moons)

Then you've got asteroids that are contact binaries that also have moons, like
216 Kleopatra.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/216_Kleopatra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/216_Kleopatra)

And finally, you have 624 Hektor, which is a Trojan of Jupiter (stable solar
orbit near Jupiter's L4 Lagrange point), that is a a likely contact binary
that has a moon. So it's orbiting the Sun, while "orbiting" Jupiter's L4
point, while all 3 components (the two halves of the contact binary, and their
moon) orbit the center of mass of their own little 'Hector system'.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/624_Hektor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/624_Hektor)

------
breck
Is there a CSV somewhere?

~~~
mmphosis
_Devstronomy project aims to provide datasets related to astronomy in an
accessible format (CSV, JSON, SQL)._

[https://devstronomy.com/#/datasets#csv](https://devstronomy.com/#/datasets#csv)

