Talk:Galilean moons
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I hope noone minds that I've moved this to "Galilean moons", in the plural, because there is really no such thing as a Galilean moon and the four only have in common their discovery in a group. I know this is not the usual singular convention, but consider usage; Google gives 28x the number of hits for the plural.--Pharos 00:09, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Is there any evidence that anyone has ever actually managed to see even Callisto as separate from Jupiter with the naked eye? I suspect not. RandomCritic 17:22, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
Shouldn't the history behind the discovery of the moons come later in the article? Probably, the list of moons should come earlier.
I have an issue with this part of the article - 'whether this was actually achieved by the Chaldeans remains a matter of speculation'. Since the word 'Chaldeans' leads to a disambiguation page, it could do with clarifying. Unfortunately I know nothing about the subject, and many of the potential meanings could be the correct one. Hopefully one of you knowledgable people will be abl;e to clear this up.
[edit] Pre-Galilean observations
While the Gan De connection, dubious as it is, at least has a real astronomical observation behind it, the "Horus" and "Marduk" conjectures do not appear to refer to astronomy at all - the citation given is totally inadequate - and don't belong in this article. So I'm deleting them. RandomCritic 20:14, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Hodierna names
I'm having some trouble with these. For one thing it's not clear where they actually appear -- I assume the Ephemerides, but I can't find this securely stated anywhere. For another, it's claimed that the names are for the "four Medici brothers" -- but which brothers? The names given are Principharus, Victipharus, Cosmipharus and Ferdinandipharus. But Cosimo II's brothers were Francesco, Carlo, and Lorenzo -- no Ferdinand among them; and his sons were Ferdinando II, Giancarlo, Matteo and Leopoldo -- without a Cosimo. Ferdinando II had a son Cosimo (III) who would have been a child at the time of the publication of the Ephemerides. And who do Principharus and Victipharus refer to? My best guess at this time is that Principharus stands for the late Medici ruler at the time Hodierna was writing, Cosimo II; Ferdinandipharus for his son, Ferdinando II; Cosmipharus for Ferdinando's son, Cosimo III; and Victipharus (some web sources have Victripharus, I'm not sure which is correct) for Ferdinando's wife, Vittoria della Rovere. But that's all guesswork. If anyone has access to Hodierna's Ephemerides, perhaps they could see if it contains an explanation? RandomCritic 10:51, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
