Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (astronomical objects)

message: (See also the discussion at Talk:Eris (dwarf planet)/Archive 4#Requested_move) — Preceding unsigned comment added by AndrewRT (talk • contribs) 22:25, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discussion at Eris 

message: It appears that specific clusters (see :Category:Open_clusters) are generally named with a capital C (e.g. (Arches Cluster). This makes sense to me as it distinguishes a specific cluster from a more generic term such as Open cluster or Embedded cluster. However, there are exceptions e.g. Coronet cluster, Quintuplet cluster. What is the naming convention for clusters? Colonies Chris (talk) 09:37, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: This is covered in the Capitalisation section of the guideline - capitalise if it's part of the proper noun. Modest Genius talk 15:05, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Naming conventions for open clusters 

message: This seems to be the standard, but I am not aware of it having been written up anywhere. So maybe we could add it?
*If the moon is named, the default title is just the name if it is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, e.g. Enceladus. But due to mythology it usually isn't, so we disambiguate using "(moon)", e.g. Titan (moon).
*If the moon is numbered, but not named, the default title is the Roman-numeral designation, e.g. Jupiter LIV.
*If the moon is neither numbered nor named, the default title is the provisional designation, e.g. S/2003 J 10.
Double sharp (talk) 09:51, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Late reply here, but yeah sure; go ahead and add it to the page. Somehow the conventions for planetary moons don't have their own section here yet. Nrco0e (talk · contribs) 00:22, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Added (a bit less colloquially). Double sharp (talk) 19:24, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Naming conventions for planetary moons 

message: We're to preserve diacritics, and also "if the name contains an ʻokina it should be preserved." Does that mean we should even if the MPC substitutes the ʻokina with an ASCII hyphen in its online DB? I know they have technical problems with the non-ASCII blocks of Unicode; I was involved in a round of emails trying to get Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà corrected, and although they appreciated the help, in the end they only got it half right. (They were even reluctant to approve the name Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà because they knew they wouldn't be able to accommodate it properly, and asked the discoverers/proposers if they couldn't spell the name a different way to make it easier on them. That was a conflict with their stated aim of being culturally inclusive.) Currently, JPL lists its moon as ⟨(229762) G!kun||'homdima I Gǃòʼé ǃHú⟩ – that is, half ASCII-ified and have Unicodified. That obviously is a formatting issue, not an authority for using those specific characters. (Besides, WP can't accept "G!kun||'homdima" as an article title.) It's not uncommon for the MPC, JPL and the USGS to use different Unicode characters in a non-ASCII name, so the characters themselves are not authoritative. 
I take it from the statement that ʻokinas should be preserved, that other non-ASCII letters should be preserved as well. (Specifically, at 594913 ʼAylóʼchaxnim, where the MPC substitutes ASCII punctuation marks for the glottal stops.) To clarify, I amended the wording to "if the name contains an ʻokina or other non-ASCII character, it should be preserved."
Might never come up, but potentially a similar issue with Caesar's comet. If the MPC number were used in the title, it should be  with a proper minus sign, not a hyphen. — kwami (talk) 04:05, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: This seems a topic to resolve at the MOS level, not within WP:AST. The official names of comets and asteroids are those listed in the IAU bulletins (of the WGSBN), not JPL or MPC. Similarly, official names of moons and surface features are those in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. Note Wikipedia:Naming conventions (astronomical objects)#Common names favours the official name only if it is also the WP:COMMONNAME. How we should turn non-English characters in those sources into article titles (or mentions in the text) is a matter of Romanisation, not specific to astronomy. WP:ROMAN has guidelines for some languages, but not the ones you're querying. WP:DIACRITICS is the closest guideline I could find, but that unhelpfully says the use of special characters is 'neither encouraged nor discouraged'. Maybe ask on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (use English)? Modest Genius talk 14:14, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: AFAICT none of them address which Unicode character to use when there are options, but the precedent of using a proper okina for Hawaiian names (rather than a quotation mark, which may look identical) suggests that we should do the same for other languages. — kwami (talk) 19:53, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

text:  The WGSBN Bulletin only dates from May this year. What's our ref for objects named before then? I'm curious if the okina was actually used for the Hawaiian names our guidelines say we should maintain the okinas for. — kwami (talk) 22:51, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Prior to the new bulletin, names with diacritics were published in the PDF versions of the MPCs (not MPECs). They're very large files though. For example, in the Nov 2019 MPC new names are listed from pages 990-994. Modest Genius talk 12:17, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks. Do they have an index, either of named bodies or just of MPCs? I don't know how to look up the bodies in question. — kwami (talk) 21:55, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

text: Funny that the IAU named the crater van't Hoff, but the corresponding asteroid  van 't Hoff. Spaces in asteroid names are rare, and only used when deemed necessary (for example, the space between first and last names is almost always left out). If one needed an example that the IAU does not always follow its own guidelines (a.k.a. its unwritten rules), here it is. Renerpho (talk) 00:25, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I brought some cases to their attention where the diacritics were wrong (a macron for s.t. else, perhaps due to a low-res copy of the source doc), or where one diacritic was dropped and another kept. We'll see if they clean them up. — kwami (talk) 02:13, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Ugh, without the space it just looks like a typo. :( Double sharp (talk) 15:44, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  When non-ASCII characters are not preserved online at the MPC/JPL/USGS