“Valetudo. What an odd name. Who was he—or she? Another Greek god?” I leaned down and looked at Jupiter one more time. Quinn had told me that it was the fourth brightest object in the sky after the sun, moon, and Venus. Mostly made up of gas, two and a half times larger than all the other planets in the solar system combined. First discovered by the Babylonians in the seventh or eighth century B.C. Now just a bright silver disk the size of a small bead through the lens of the telescope.

“You’re almost right,” Quinn said. “Valetudo was the Roman goddess of health and hygiene, plus she was the great-granddaughter of Jupiter, who, of course, was Zeus to the Greeks. Anyway, Valetudo fits with all the other names since the IAU requires Jupiter’s moons to have mythological names that relate to … well, Jupiter. Valetudo may not be around long,” he added. “Since it’s going the wrong way, it might end up colliding with one of the other moons.”

“The International Astronomical Union is that strict about controlling the naming of moons?”

He nodded. “They’re strict about controlling the naming of any astronomical object. There has to be some order, some system,” he said. “And they’re not all named after characters from mythology. Uranus’s moons have names of characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. All twenty-seven of them.”

“I think Shakespearean moons sounds so poetic.”

He relit his cigar and the tip glowed again. “That’s why they picked poetic names. Titania and Oberon were the fairy king and queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most of the other names came from The Tempest, which is also all about magic.” He started ticking them off on the fingers of his non-cigar hand. “Miranda, Caliban, Prospero, Ferdinand … I forget the others, but there were seven in all.”

“Miranda and Ferdinand were characters in The Tempest?”

“That’s right. Why?”

“I saw a painting in Prescott’s wine cellar the other day. It was called Ferdinand Courting Miranda. The artist was someone named William Hogarth.”

“I saw that painting, too,” he said. “The old man in the painting was Prospero and the ugly creature was Caliban, Prospero’s slave and a witch’s son. I thought it seemed odd among all those black-and-white photographs that were hanging on the wall.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “Do you know anything about the plot of The Tempest?”

“Actually, I do. After I found out about the IAU and the naming thing I bought a copy of Shakespeare’s plays so I could figure out who all the characters were.”

He had brought the book with him when he moved his otherwise spartan collection of possessions into my house after we got engaged.