Ok, this one just has me shaking my head. Until tonight, I was completely unaware of the existence of... *sigh*... the Pac Man Nebula, aka NGC 281. Pac Man? Are you kidding me? And I thought I was a geek.

As long as I've discovered this ridiculously-monickered nebula, how many other equally silly titles are out there? Please tell me there aren't Donkey Kong and Centipede nebulae too...

Well, there's the "Finger globule":

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0404495

I heard that the first author of that paper was having problems with his former advisor... we wondered whether it was the title of the paper that had anything to do with it.

There's also the "Green Goober" nebula, but I don't know if anyone outside of Astronomy Camp calls it that.

Green Goober - NGC 7027

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The Dark Doodad

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Sorry but I always thought 'Milky Way' pretty lame in the grand scheem of things.

Made even worse by some clowns decision to call that small sat galaxy on the far side of our galaxy 'Snickers'

On a side note - when the first Mariner probe was approaching Mars, the mother of all sand storms swept across the planet. As the sand settled three objects could be seen poking up through the dust.

We now know them as volcanoes.

At the time they were called Mo, Larry and Curley

So the tradition of playful stupidity has a long history

When Jocelyn Bell discovered the first pulsar in the 1960's, it was named LGM-1 because it was thought the regular radio pulses might be signals from aliens: Little Green Men.

Actually, that's a pretty cool astronomical name.

You want cooler? In my language (I'm Malaysian, btw), we call the Milky Way, Bima Sakti.

Isn't there a Martian rock called Yoga?

It was named "Yogi" during the Mars Pathfinder/Sojourner mission, due to its resemblance to a certain better-than-the-average bear.

:wink:

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Other rocks named at the Pathfinder/Sojourner site (Sagan Memorial Station)...

Ren
Stimpy
Scooby Doo
Barnacle Bill
Little Matterhorn
Couch
Gromit
Flat Top
Little Flat Top

Guess the International Astronomical Union doesn't get to vote on Martian rock names.

Well, they'll never be "official" names.

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If you name every rock in your driveway you just might be a NASA scientist.

All those stars that got named after people as their birthday present, espcially when we get out there.

"I claim this planet, um... (do I have to say the name? all right...) I claim this planet, Peter Palmer IV (sigh) in the name of Planet Earth. Oh, bleep, there was no one named Peter Palmer, was there? It's like Al Kaholic or Diana Cancer."










Yes, yes, I know...

I know this is off-topic, but here's a paper along the Snickers lines ... http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/np...07c2049a611897

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As Jack Handy once said, we should be thankful they liked candy bars and not Chinese food. Otherwise we'd be living in the Moo Goo Gai Pan Galaxy.

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stu, most people do have more fun with AAS abstract titles. :wink: Otherwise why should people stop by your poster.

Here's another one which I can claim to have participated in:

Super Huge Interferometric Telescope

And another from the same group of my friends:
The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations

They even got it referenced in a magazine too.

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[Astronomy's] one of those things that makes us more than just well-fed cows. It satisfies a really deep hunger to know, to go someplace, to explore ...a hunger that is as basic to human beings as food and shelter... -Br. Guy Consolmagno, Ph.D.

We read that one in our Journal Club this year. It's become my favorite paper. 8)

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