Naming the Comets

Time-lapse of Comet 2I Borisov

An artist’s impression of `Oumuamua as a dark red highly-elongated metallic or rocky object,
about 400 meters long, and unlike anything normally found in the Solar System.

On December 8 this year, a newly discovered comet looped around our Sun after a journey of more than 100 million years from the birth of some very distant star. It makes its closest pass to Earth today and then heads out of our solar system again. By the middle of 2020, the comet will streak past Jupiter's distance of 500 million miles on its way back into interstellar space where it will drift for untold millions of years before skirting close to another star system.

It's only the second interstellar object to visit us, so it's a big deal. But it has the very boring name of "Comet 2I Borisov." It was discovered by Gennady Borisov, a Crimean astronomer, and, of course, he wanted his piece of history.

A much more interesting name goes to the first interstellar object to visit our solar system. That was ʻOumuamua.

The International Astronomical Union assigns designations for astronomical objects and they originally classified it as Comet C/2017 U1. Then it was reclassified as the equally boring asteroid A/2017 U1. The renaming was because it had no "coma" - the nebulous envelope around the nucleus of a comet formed when the comet passes close to the Sun and warms so that it gets a "fuzzy" appearance when viewed in telescopes and distinguishes it from stars. The word coma comes from the Greek "kome" (κόμη), which means "hair" and is the origin of the word comet itself.

Once this comet was identified as coming from outside the Solar System, a new designation was created: I, for Interstellar object. ʻOumuamua, as the first object so identified, was designated 1I but is also referred to as 1I; 1I/2017 U1; 1I/ʻOumuamua; or 1I/2017 U1 (ʻOumuamua). I'm only interested in ʻOumuamua.

What caught my attention first was that first character which is a Hawaiian ʻokina, and not an apostrophe. It is pronounced as a glottal stop.  The name comes directly from the Hawaiian word ʻoumuamua, meaning "scout," because the object has come from so far away to check us out. The name was chosen by the Pan-STARRS team in consultation with Kaʻiu Kimura and Larry Kimura of the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. It was discovered by Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii.

That is a much better name than 1I. But I would have been quite happy if they had gone with another suggested name: Rama. That is the name given to an alien spacecraft discovered under similar circumstances in the 1973 science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a novel I really enjoyed reading. That object was seen as an alien craft that was on a scouting expedition checking out the rest of the universe.

 ʻOumuamua is tumbling, rather than smoothly rotating, and is moving so fast relative to the Sun that there is no chance it originated in the Solar System and it cannot be captured into a solar orbit. It will leave our Solar System and resume traveling through interstellar after roughly 20,000 years of travel in the Solar System.

ʻOumuamua's planetary system of origin and the amount of time it has spent traveling amongst the stars are unknown. I love that mystery.

Ultima Thule

It is more difficult to get the public interested in celestial objects when they have names like "2014 MU69." Astronomers tend to name things initially and officially in that way but "sexier" names seem to come later more and more. (see this about that) This is a good thing. This site asks, "What's in a name?" A character from Shakespeare might say it doesn't matter, but I say it matters a lot.

The NASA team that works with the New Horizons exploratory spacecraft gave 2014 MU69 the nickname of Ultima Thule. Much better.

Thule was a mythical island that appeared on some old maps as being at the edge of the known world. It was also labeled as "Tile" on at least one map from 1539 called the Carta Marina. This was a map of what Nordic sailors knew about the world. They placed Thule near the Faroe Islands.

The Faroe Islands are not mythical. They (AKA Faeroe Islands) are a North Atlantic archipelago located 200 miles (320 km) north-northwest of the United Kingdom and about halfway between Norway and Iceland. Today they are an autonomous country of the Kingdom of Denmark with a total area of about 540 square miles and a population of over 50,000.

The direct translation of Ultima Thule is “beyond Thule” and is a very fitting name for something beyond the edges of our currently known world.

If you want to know a bit more about the space exploration side of Ultima Thule, check out this post on one of my other blogs. 

Thule (TILE) near the Faroe Islands - Carta Marina map, 1539.

Kodak

An original Kodak camera

The company we know as Kodak was once known as the Eastman Kodak company. Digital photography and video killed most of their business which ranged from the average consumer to the big Hollywood movie studios. The company is not a big player in either market these days, but it once ruled the American film and photography business.

George Eastman received a patent for the first film camera in 1888. Eastman had been an enthusiastic photographer but found bulky cameras and heavy, breakable glass plates cumbersome and inconvenient. He wanted to make it easier for people to take up photography.

By 1880, he had improved on the previous photographic plate, so he formed his own business. He then developed cellulose film which could be rolled onto a spool which eliminated the need for plates altogether. 

Next, he designed a camera that could make use of a roll of film and he obtained a patent for that invention, which came to be known as the Kodak box camera. The box camera could hold enough rolled film to shoot 100 exposures and it completely revolutionized the art and science of photography. 

The genius of his company is summarized in the slogan he patented - “You press the button. We do the rest.” They sold you the camera, sold you the film, and did the processing and printing. They owned the whole cycle of photography. Even if you did your own developing and printing in a darkroom, you bought their chemicals and paper.

The name “Kodak” is also an invention of George Eastman. It actually has no special meaning. He once explained, “I devised the name myself. The letter ‘K’ had been a favorite with me — it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with ‘K.’ The word ‘Kodak’ is the result.”

The company known as Eastman Kodak eventually shortened its name to just Kodak. 

By Work-Order Studio to Commons., Public Domain, Link