- Astronomical symbols
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This excerpt from the 1833 Nautical Almanac demonstrates the use of astronomical symbols, including symbols for the phases of the moon, the planets, and zodiacal constellations.
Astronomical symbols are symbols used to represent various celestial objects, theoretical constructs and observational events in astronomy. The earliest forms of these symbols appear in Greek papyri of late antiquity. The Byzantine codices in which the Greek papyri were preserved continued and extended the inventory of astronomical symbols.[1][2] New symbols were further invented to represent many just-discovered planets and minor planets discovered in the 18th-20th centuries.
All these symbols were once commonly used by professional astronomers, amateur astronomers, and astrologers. They are still used in almanacs and astrological publications, but with the exception of the Sun and Earth symbols they have fallen into disuse in published research and texts on astronomy.[3]
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Symbols for the Sun and Moon
The use of astronomical symbols for the Sun and Moon dates to antiquity. The forms of the symbols that appear in the original papyri of Greek horoscopes are a circle with one ray (
) for the Sun and a crescent for the Moon.[2] The modern sun symbol, a circle with a dot (☉), first appeared in Europe in the Renaissance,[2] though it was also the ancient Chinese character for "sun", which gave rise to the modern character 日.[4]In modern academic usage, the sun symbol is used for astronomical constants relating to the sun.[5] The luminosity, mass, and radius of stars are often represented using the corresponding solar constants as units of measurement.[6]
Sun
Name Symbol Unicode Unicode Display Symbol Represents Sun 
[7][8][9]#x2609;
#9737;☉ the Sun 
[2]#x1f71a;
#128794;
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