Even if you’ve had only occasional contact with the world of astronomy and stargazing, you’ve heard or read of some of the names of the stars, and most of them don’t exactly roll gently off the tongue.
There are several schemes for naming the stars. There’s even a company out there that will sell you the opportunity to name a star after yourself or a loved one. If you part with some cash to do that for yourself or someone special in your life, do it for the fun of it.
Believe me, if you’re naming a star after your old Uncle Louie, no serious astronomer at any university or college will ever research the possibility of a solar system of planets orbiting Louie.
They may be studying the star you know as Louie, but they certainly won’t refer to it as such. The only parties that will call your star after your uncle will be you and the company that sold you the name of the star.
Every single star that you see already has a name assigned to it. You may have run across star maps with Greek letters next to the stars. This is the universally accepted astronomical star-naming system referred to as the Bayer system, where stars are named according to their brightness in their respective constellations.
The brightest star in a given constellation is referred to as the alpha star, the second brightest beta, the third brightest gamma, and so on through the rest of the Greek alphabet. After all of the Greek letters are exhausted, regular letters and numbers are used.
The biggest problem with the Bayer system is that the alpha star may not be the brightest star you can see with the naked eye in a given constellation, and the beta star may not be the second obviously brightest and so on. The difference between the brightness of stars is hard to distinguish in most cases.
Most of the brighter stars are known more commonly by their age-old traditional or “proper” names. Some of these stars also have multiple traditional names, depending on your part of the world.
The names of most stars have ancient origins from a hodgepodge of languages. Some of the oldest known names have been passed down from the ancient Greeks. Many of the names, though, are Arabic, because in the middle ages the Arabs were highly organized astronomers who cataloged many of the stars and constellations passed down from the ancient Greeks.
Many of the Arabic names are still in use today, although a lot of them were translated into Latin and were corrupted along the way, changing their meaning, or in some cases stripping them of all meaning or sense.
Some of the star names translate into the body parts of the particular constellation. For example Rigel, pronounced Rye-jell, is the brightest star in Orion and translates as “the foot” in English.
Betelgeuse, pronounced beetle–juice, is the second brightest star in Orion and is one of my favorite star names, translating roughly to “armpit of the great one.”
In the diagram and table, I have a sampling of other stars and their names in “Orion and his Gang,” now prominent in the south-southwest sky in the early evenings.
There are a lot of good Web sites on sstar names such as tinyurl.com/cn7jhr.
You won’t find Uncle Louie though.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Washington Starwatch”, available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com.
The Everett Astronomical Society welcomes new members and puts on public star parties. Its Web site is: www.everettastro.org.
Orion’s Gang
Aldebaran: “the follower” (because it follows the Pleiades star cluster)
Betelgeuse: “armpit of Orion”
Castor: “the beaver”
Capella: “the she goat”
Pollux: “much wine”
Procyon: “before the dog” (because it rises before the constellation Canis Major, the big dog.
Rigel: “the foot” (of Orion)
Sirius: “the scorching” (because it’s the brightest star in night sky)
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