The Planetary Society’s blog reports that the International Astronomical Union has approved new names for features on Saturn’s moon Dione, and provides an equatorial map with the new names added to spaceprobe imagery.

But what also caught my attention was the entry’s link to the USGS’s Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, which provides such interesting information as descriptor names for various planetary features and what those features are named after for each planet (craters on Mercury are named after deceased artists; everything on Venus is named after a goddess of something or other).

(Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI; mosaic by Steve Albers; map by Jason Perry.)