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Originally Posted by Arneb
So I am back, and we lost 2:3 to them Brasilians - well, no shame to loose against those....
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Lucky for Brasil, but that Ballack...If Germany wants to send a gift to the US... :P
(sorry, couldn't resist)
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And finally, Amalthea was the nymph (I hadn't heard about the goat, the horn and cornucopia - nice to learn that one!) who nursed Zeus when he had to hide from the voracious appetite for children that his father Kronos (Saturn) had.
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I just want to say something about this mythology business, since it's come up often enough with the stars. You will rarely find two variations of these myths to be the same; their sources are Homer (the Illiad and the Odyssey), some tablets found on mainland Greece, Hesiod, Pindar, the Greek tragedy playwrights, such as Sophocles, and Ovid's "Metamorphoses." When invaders from the North in Greece mixed with the traditions of Crete, their beliefs in the gods were a bit different, and so you have this mixture of several cultural traditions. The end of the Minoan-Mycenean was a dark time, and Homer's "Illiad" and "Odyssey" was the beginning of a cultural reawakening, and these are important, especially, as they were the first we know of those stories being written down, since the Greeks formed a true alphabet at that time. The islands and Athens societies had different traditions. You will not find exact accounts of the battle of the Titans, where Zeus and Kronos's (or Cronus) regurgitated children fight against their father and the Titans. Some of these myths do mirror some real history--the $100 word is
etiology--but all we have are different versions of similar stories. No one is
right.
My point is, Sophocles has it that horn of Achelous was exchanged with the horn of Almathea, which was this "horn of plenty," the cornucopia pictured throughout much artwork. Ovid, in Latin, has it that Almathea was a nymph or Goddess of Plenty. I tend to adhere to the Greek versions of these myths, because they were earlier, and too, I feel they are grittier. So, naturally with all these Latin versions of Saturn, et al, it is as much a cultural choice of what story to choose now, as it was then. But again, one is not necessarily more right than the other (the short explanation, it's all pretty ~arggh~ complex).
It seems like there should be some consistency--if it's a Greek name, use an earlier Greek story, if it's a Roman name, use Ovid's version, but alas, it's all academic.
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Arneb, yeah, you got the biggest meteorite, the Hoba West! Mickal gets points for prompting. =D>
I only know that and the US one:
Willamette, which is from Oregon, US, and is in the American Museum of Natural History. It's 10-feet long and 5-feet high, and 15.4 tons.
Just trivia I picked up in a book:
The Australian one, as
C-Munch said, is
Mundrabilla found in
Western Australia and weighs 13.2 tons. Mexico, the 3rd largest found (it also has #11), is called Bacuberito and weighs 29.8 tons. Greenland gets #2 at 33.5 tons, and is called Ahnighito (The Tent). Argentina has one at 14.3 and is named Campo del Cielo.
Arneb's question still stands:
There is a single Messier object that has a causal link with a recorded event in human history: Which M, what kind of event, which year?
Time to get ready to view the trio...good evening all.