About the Name
It’s pronounced hy-PEER-ee-en. In Greek mythology, Hyperion (“The High One”) was the
Titan of light, son of Gaia (goddess of Earth) and Uranus (god of the sky). It's also the
name of a moon of Saturn
3
, a great series of books by Dan Simmons, the genus of a really
scary-looking beetle, the world's tallest known living tree, Los Angeles' main sewage
treatment plant, an unfinished epic poem by John Keats, Jim Raynor's flagship in StarCraft,
and a horribly boring piece of database reporting software that this author used in a
previous life when it was called something else. The hoop's named after the Titan,
though.
3
Saturn seems like the obvious answer when you think of hoop-themed celestial bodies, but Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, is named for the mythological
Trojan youth abducted by Zeus to be his cup-bearer, and in ancient Greek art as far back as 500 BC he’s depicted with a hoop. He’s also shown running
naked and holding a cockerel while rolling his hoop and I’m not sure what’s up with that, but you could probably still get away with it at Burning Man today.
As long as you didn’t get feathers everywhere, anyway.