Talk:Uranus

Updated magnitude range

The new values of brightest and faintest apparent magnitude in the ‘infobox’ were reported in a peer-reviewed journal article that includes updated equations for computing planetary magnitudes. Those formulas will be used to predict magnitudes for future issues of The Astronomical Almanac published by the U.S. Naval Observatory and Her Majesty’s Nautical Almanac Office. The equations were solved at daily intervals over long periods of time in order to determine the magnitude extremes. As noted in the journal article, the apparent brightness of Uranus depends on the latitudes illuminated by the Sun and viewed by the observer. The extreme magnitudes reported here take those factors into account. The paper in Astronomy and Computing can be located at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ascom.2018.08.002. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Planet photometry (talk • contribs) 14:41, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

Name in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese

The final paragraph of the "Name" section says that the planet has the same name in all four of the above languages - and then shows three Chinese characters in brackets (天王星), wrongly implying that all four languages are now written in Chinese characters. Obviously Chinese is, and some Japanese words are too, including "Uranus", which is thus also spelled 天王星 - only the Japanese pronunciation of the characters - "ten-nousei" or "ten-ousei", as there are two phonetic Japanese spellings, てんのうせい and てんおうせい - differs from the Chinese ("tiān wáng xīng"). Both Korean and Vietnamese were long ago written in Chinese characters, but have now replaced them with a uniquely Korean alphabet (Uranus = 천왕성, pronounced "cheonwangseong", which does sound rather like the Chinese name) and a Latin-based Vietnamese one (Uranus = sao thiên vương, which sounds very different). Although the four translations do indeed mean "sky king star", more or less, it is misleading to suggest that 天王星 is now standard Korean and Vietnamese, since neither language currently uses Chinese characters. I would suggest the Chinese characters simply be dropped, as they add nothing useful to the meaning of the text, and introduce confusing information. Alternatively the correct modern spellings could be inserted - but since the Chinese and Japanese names look identical and there would thus be only three translations for four languages, this would surely be confusing to readers who have no in-depth knowledge of East Asian languages (and that's the vast majority).89.212.50.177 (talk) 12:02, 14 September 2018 (UTC)