ANCIENT GLYPHS ON SATURNS MOONS MANUAL

In a letter to Herschel, Lalande described it as ' un globe surmonté par la première lettre de votre nom' ('a globe surmounted by the first letter of your name'). Several orientations were suggested, but an upright arrow is now universal.Īnother symbol, ♅, was suggested by Lalande in 1784. Gold and iron are the planetary metals for the Sun and Mars, and so share their symbols. Köhler and refined by Bode, was intended to represent the newly discovered metal platinum since platinum, commonly called white gold, was found by chemists mixed with iron, the symbol for platinum combines the alchemical symbols for iron, ♂, and gold, ☉.

The symbols for Uranus were created shortly after its discovery in 1781. Modern discoveries Uranus Platinum symbol for Uranus Herschel monogram for Uranus Unicode encodes the symbol as U+2640 ♀ FEMALE SIGN, in the Miscellaneous Symbols block. This gendered association of Venus and Mars has been used to pair them heteronormatively, describing women and men stereotypically as being so different that they can be understood as coming from different planets, an understanding popularized in 1992 by the book titled Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Īrising from the biological convention, the symbol also came to be used in sociological contexts to represent women or femininity. In botany and biology, the symbol for Venus is used to represent the female sex, alongside the symbol for Mars representing the male sex, įollowing a convention introduced by Linnaeus in the 1750s. In the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri 235, the symbols for Venus and Mercury did not have the cross on the bottom stem, and Venus still appears without the cross (⚲) in Johannes Kamateros (12th century). It has been interpreted as a depiction of the hand-mirror of the goddess, which may also explain Venus's association with the planetary metal copper, as mirrors in antiquity were made of polished copper (alloy), The Venus symbol, ♀, consists of a circle with a small cross below it. Venus Crosshatched copper symbol for Venus Its Unicode codepoint is U+263F ☿ MERCURY. It was also once the designated symbol for hermaphroditic or 'perfect' flowers, but botanists now use ⚥ for these instead.

Ī related usage is for the 'worker' or 'neuter' sex among social insects that is neither male nor (due to its lack of reproductive capacity) fully female, such as for example worker bees. The ☿ symbol has also been used to indicate intersex, transgender, or non-binary gender. The modern forms of the classical planetary symbols are found in a woodcut of the seven planets in a Latin translation of Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi's De Magnis Coniunctionibus printed at Venice in 1506, represented as the corresponding gods riding chariots. According to Maunder, the addition of crosses appears to be 'an attempt to give a savour of Christianity to the symbols of the old pagan gods.' These cross-marks first appear in the late 15th or early 16th century. Ī diagram in the astronomical compendium by Johannes Kamateros (12th century) closely resembles the 11th-century forms shown above, with the Sun represented by a circle with a single ray, Jupiter by the letter zeta (the initial of Zeus, Jupiter's counterpart in Greek mythology), Mars by a round shield in front of a diagonal spear, and the remaining classical planets by symbols resembling the modern ones, though without the crosshatch-marks seen in modern versions of Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. The symbol for Saturn in late Classical (4th & 5th c.) and medieval Byzantine (11th c.) mss. The symbols of Venus and Mars are also used to represent female and male in biology following a convention introduced by Carl Linnaeus in the 1750s. The modern planets with their traditional symbols and IAU abbreviations are:

ANCIENT GLYPHS ON SATURNS MOONS MANUAL

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) discourages the use of these symbols in modern journal articles, and their style manual proposes one- and two-letter abbreviations for the names of the planets for cases where planetary symbols might be used, such as in the headings of tables. The classical planets, their symbols, days and most commonly associated planetary metals are: The use of these symbols derives from classical Greco-Roman astronomy, although their current altered shapes were developed in the 16th century. The symbols were also used in alchemy to represent the metals associated with the planets, and in calendars for their associated days. Graphical symbols used in astrology and astronomyĪ planet symbol or planetary symbol is a graphical symbol used in astrology and astronomy to represent a classical planet (including the Sun and the Moon) or one of the modern planets.

Ancient glyphs on saturns moons