Jonathan Swift and the moons of Mars

     Last night the sky over our city was so clear you could see Mars as a point that whimsically showed its redish color and then not. Mars is the Roman name for the Greek god of war, Ares. Romans pretty much adopted a great part of the Greek culture including the religion and just changing the names with some of their own making (the exception is perhaps Janus, the two-faced god). In Roman culture Mars was an important god, more even than Jupiter himself; understandable, considering how tightly they embraced warfare. The presence of Mars in the sky was not regarded by all cultures the same way. Some saw it as a herald of ominous things to come. the Egyptians knew about its retrograde motion, the indians tried to calculate their diameter,the Babylonians recorded its position and movements, the Italians calculated its distance to the Sun, andin 1610,  Galilei´s eyes were the first to observe its surface through a telescope.                                                                                                                                                                            
       Jonathan Swift mentioned, a hundred and fifty years earlier than their actual discovery, that Mars had two moons in his famous work , Gulliver´s Travels. How could Swift do that? Really, there´s so much we still don´t know.

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