Hello again,

I would like to point your attention to a wonderful article recently published online by a friend of mine, Andrzej Karon (pronounced AND-ZHEY CAR-ON), who is an amateur astronomer from Poland. I guess it might be THE most concise and up to date article about planetary moons as well as asteroidal moons, including the most recent developments in the subject and entirely translated into English Please take a look:

http://ksiezyce.republika.pl/download/all_...t_and_small.pdf

Andrzej also made a wonderful animation of asteroid Sylvia which has 2 moons just like Mars. It can be found here:

http://moonlets.republika.pl/animations_en.html

Regards,

Karol P.

There appears to have been a server glitch of some kind. The article will load now. Enjoy:

Click

Much appreciated, thanks.

A nice overview. I should point out that if the current rate of discovery of new moons doesn't abate considerably and soon, we will soon be talking about "belts" around the giant planets, rather than individual moons. In the cases of Jupiter and Saturn, with 55 and 35 outer moons respectively, I think we're already at that point.

More could be said about the remarkable multitude of small moons close to Uranus -- like a ring system with unusually large particles. The continuing lack of interest in this system baffles me.

For a considerable time, I've been referring to the populations of inner and outer moons as "inner gravel" and "outer gravel", emphasizing the small size and "ground up bits and pieces" nature of the populations.

Perhaps we should only call them Moons if they have 'cleared their orbits', Dwarf Moons if they are 'rounded by gravity' but are just part of a swarm, otherwise Small Jupiter System Bodies????

Or call everything up to Janus "classical moons" and everything that was discovered after Janus gets a telephone-number name Anyway, they ARE running out of names... The names for newly discovered moons are getting ever more weird.