Uranus (mythology) Uranus (mythology) Uranus (; Ancient Greek , "Ouranos" meaning "sky" or "heaven") was the primal Greek god personifying the sky and one of the Greek primordial deities. Uranus is associated with the Roman god Caelus. In Ancient Greek literature, Uranus or Father Sky was the son and husband of Gaia, Mother Earth. According to Hesiod's "Theogony", Uranus was conceived by Gaia alone, but other sources cite Aether as his father. Uranus and Gaia were the parents of the first generation of Titans, and the ancestors of most of the Greek gods, but no cult addressed directly to Uranus survived into
Moons of Uranus the sylphs Ariel and Umbriel from Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" (Ariel is also a sprite in Shakespeare's "The Tempest"). The reasoning was presumably that Uranus, as god of the sky and air, would be attended by spirits of the air. Subsequent names, rather than continuing the airy spirits theme (only Puck and Mab continued the trend), have focused on Herschel's source material. In 1949, the fifth moon, Miranda, was named by its discoverer Gerard Kuiper after a thoroughly mortal character in Shakespeare's "The Tempest". The current IAU practice is to name moons after characters from Shakespeare's plays