Extraterrestrial Skies

by Wiki Safari on April 9, 2009 | Trackback URI | Email This Post | 70 Views

Today on our wiki safari we begin with Extraterrestrial skies, which was a featured link on reddit today. It’s a really fascinating article about how the skies of the planets in our solar system would look if you were able to stand on them and look up. They have actual photos of Mars’ sky, and every time I see those, they fill me with a great sensation of loneliness. It reminds of being on a dusty plane in the wild west as night falls and the temperatures goes down with the sun. Of course on Mars the temperature is always just ridiculously cold.

Mars sunset PIA00920 Extraterrestrial Skies

Next stop on my safari was Apparent magnitude, which is how people measure the brightness of objects. The system is ancient, popularized by Ptolemy back in Roman times. Lot’s of small interesting facts in that article, it’s a logarithmic scale, people used to think the eye worked in a logarithmic way, but apparently they think it uses a power kind of way. It’s all a little too mathematical for my mood right now.

i move on to Ptolemy, because I’ve always heard about him, but don’t know too much. He’s Roman scientist (90 – 168) who is best known for three books: one on astronomy, one on geography, and one on astrology. Ptolemy lived in Roman Egypt, and was probably originally of Greek decent, though he was a Roman citizen. In Arabic he is known as Batlamyus. I like reading about the geography part, it’s interesting to see what people’s world was back thousands of years ago. It’s also interesting because it was used for thousands of years. In fact it’s hard to know what Ptolemy actually wrote in certain parts because scribes would copy it wrong and update it with what they new. It sort of became a living book. He is also known to have written a couple of more minor books on music and optics, which sound interesting.

There was an interesting discussion on Ptolemy’s name, so I decided to explore Roman naming conventions next. So apparently Roman’s had three name: the praenomen, nomen (gentile), and the cognomen. The praenomen was like first name, the nomen was like the clan name, and the cognomen was like a family name. The nomen and cognomen were hereditary, but weirdly only the nomen was really used. The praenomen was only used by intimates and there were only a few that were used. So I guess the cognomen was used as a nickname until it became hereditary, then they started using what they called agnomen as nicknames. It’s all pretty confusing. And that’s just men. The women were just named after their fathers + a number, which is kind of funny to me I guess.

Ok, well that wraps up our first wiki safari. Hope you enjoyed learning about stuff with Wikipedia as much as I did! Until next time pardners, remember it’s not only the largest dictionary, it’s also the most accurate.