Wikipedia:WikiProject Astronomical Objects

Planets and moons

This page is where work is being done to come up with a generic table template to be used for organizing a list of facts about various astronomical bodies such as planets, natural satellites, and maybe also smaller bodies such as asteroids and comets (though I suspect that both asteroids and comets will be better served by having their own template design).

Most of these entries should be measured in SI units. Some of them, however, should have more "human-accessible" units, either in addition to or instead of SI units. I've indicated some cases with a second unit name in brackets. In the case of times (orbital periods, rotation), I think it best to translate the time into years, days, hours, etc.; whatever is most appropriate for the duration being described.

Oh, and compared to table templates for things like the elements, I think that this template should be considered somewhat more flexible. Moons with no atmosphere whatsoever could skip the atmospheric composition section entirely, for example (though atmospheric density would still be listed). Moons also wouldn't have their orbital radii listed in AU, since AUs are such large units. For planets, use "perihelion" and "aphelion" instead of "periapsis" and "apoapsis."

In the case of "number of moons" and "is a moon of", only one of these rows will be used by any given object. There aren't any moons with moons, though perhaps "co-orbital with" might be a useful row to add in a few cases.

A set of colors for use in the 2-column headers of this table:

Conversion log

Done:

• Mercury
• Venus
• Earth
  • Luna
• Mars
  • Phobos
  • Deimos
• Jupiter
  • Metis
  • Adrastea
  • Amalthea
  • Thebe
  • Io
  • Europa
  • Ganymede
  • Callisto
  • Leda (still stuby)
  • Himalia (still stuby)
  • Lysithea (still stuby)
  • Elara (still stuby)
  • Ananke (still stuby)
  • Carme (still stuby)
  • Pasiphae (still stuby)
  • Sinope (still stuby)
• Saturn
  • Pan
  • Prometheus
  • Pandora
  • Epimetheus
  • Janus
  • Mimas
  • Enceladus (moon)
  • Tethys
  • Titan
  • Dione
  • Rhea
  • Hyperion
  • Iapetus
• Uranus
  • Cordelia (work in progress))
  • Ophelia (work in progress))
  • Bianca (work in progress))
  • Cressida (work in progress))
  • Desdemona (work in progress))
  • Juliet (work in progress))
  • Rosalind (work in progress))
  • Belinda (work in progress))
  • Puck (work in progress))
  • Miranda (work in progress))
  • Oberon (work in progress))
• Neptune
  • Triton
• Pluto
  • Charon

Still to be done:

• For Saturn:
  • Atlas
  • Telesto
  • Calypso (moon)
  • Helene (moon)

Usefull sources:

• JPL's SSD, Natural Satellite Physical Parameters (http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sat_props)
• JPL's SSD, Planetary Satellite Mean Orbital Parameters (http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sat_elem)
• Solarviews (http://www.solarviews.com/eng/toc.htm)
• The Nine Planets (http://www.nineplanets.org/)

Minor planets (asteroids, comets, Kuiperoids, etc)

This table was taken from the 433 Eros article as a basis for developing a template:

Minor planets with tables:

• 1 Ceres
• 2 Pallas
• 4 Vesta
• 24 Themis
• 243 Ida
• 253 Mathilde
• 433 Eros
• 951 Gaspra

Stars

Stars with factsheets:

• Sun
• Betelgeuse
• Ras Algethi

This table was lifted from Betelgeuse and may serve as the basis of a template in the near future.

Galaxies

Galaxies with factsheets:

• M33
• M87

The following is the M87 table, that may be used (and improved) for other galaxies: