Luna moth color is blue-green in the north and for the over-wintering generation in the central and southern states; second and third generation wing color has more of a yellow-green tint. Described and named "Phalena plumata caudata" by James Petiver in 1700, this was the first North American saturniid to be reported in the insect literature. The initial Latin name, which roughly translates to "brilliant, feather tail", was replaced when Carl Linnaeus described the species in 1758 in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, and renamed it "Phalaena luna", later "Actias luna", with "luna" derived from Luna, the Roman moon goddess. The
Celestial spheres was a lasting remnant of physical celestial spheres in Kepler's cosmology. In Cicero's "Dream of Scipio," the elder Scipio Africanus describes an ascent through the celestial spheres, compared to which the Earth and the Roman Empire dwindle into insignificance. A commentary on the "Dream of Scipio" by the Roman writer Macrobius, which included a discussion of the various schools of thought on the order of the spheres, did much to spread the idea of the celestial spheres through the Early Middle Ages. Some late medieval figures noted that the celestial spheres' physical order was inverse to their order on the