[Shadowstar]

heh oops I edited my message after your Posts.

More than anything else, I wanted to keep the planet notation as clean as possible. If I went with roman numerals, I was afraid I might end up getting into some horribly twisted number strings.

I thought about a planet having a notation such as "BVIIIaII" and opted for the simpler "B8a2", referring to the second sub-moon of the first moon of the eigth planet orbiting the second star of a system. As far as I've ever seen it, roman numerals are never used in scientific planetary astronomical notation. Of course, a counterpoint to that would be that we haven't yet confirmed the existence of any moons outside the solar system (we can't see objects that small without actually travelling there, only guess that they might be there in the best cases), so it's really more that nobody can say what the proper notation is/will be. I'm just going on personal experience...

Hmmm... I've thought about this too much I think.

[ May 30, 2002, 06:42: Message edited by: Shadowstar ]