Stars

Back in my twenties I used to work nights and sometimes during my break used to go outside at about 3 am and look at the stars and wonder. One night I brought in binoculars and eagerly pointed them at the clear sky. I was staggered. All I could seem to see were points of light surrounding me. I got a bit claustrophobic and gave up. So, it’s just as well I never had the chance to experience images from the James Webb Space telescope.

If I had just kept to my own vision I could have, over the years, counted about 5,000 stars and not known the names of more than half a dozen which is a bit pathetic.

Prehistoric star maps were found in the Lascaux Caves in France dating from 15,000 BCE and a possible image of Orion on a mammoth tusk is dated to, at least, 30,000 BCE. Except that all those years ago the stars would not have had names.

 

5,500 year old Sumerian Star Map

We are, as usual, indebted to the Sumerians (see above) and Mesopotamians for starting this practice. A practice that developed through the ages until it was recorded in the First Dictionary of the Nomenclature of Celestial Objects in 1983, that there well over 1,000 different naming systems then in use, mostly for faint objects studied by professionals. Its editors despaired of the list ever being made orderly, reasonable, or complete.

In 2016, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalogue and standardize proper names for stars. Composed of an international group of astronomers, the WGSN is expected first to delve into worldwide astronomical history and culture, with the aim of cataloguing traditional star names, and approving unique star names with standardised spellings.

In 2019, the IAU organised its IAU 100 NameExoWorlds campaign to name exoplanets and their host stars. An additional two star names were approved on 4 April 2022. In June 2023 an additional 20 names where approved in the NameExoWorlds 2022 campaign bringing the current total to 471 named stars.

But hang on, I can hear some folk say, there are companies that advertise they will name a star after you or a loved one for about £50. You get a certificate and papers.

A myriad of stars in the constellation of Virgo (seen via the James Webb telescope)

Name-It-Yourself Stars Are a Hoax.

With just as much validity, you can step outside on a clear night, choose any star you like, and name it for anyone you want. For free.

One of the companies advertises that it keeps the star names in a Swiss bank vault, as if that means something. If that appeals to you, you can put a piece of paper with a star name in your own bank's safe-deposit box.

Only the IAU can officially name stars, and that’s it. So these companies will, most likely, sell you the same star they have already sold a hundred times over. Who’s going to check?

There isn’t one single thing about it that you couldn’t do yourself. Pick a star at random, name it, Google a star map to it, print that out on nice paper, mount it in a nice frame with a nice matte board.

Sometimes planetariums "sell" stars on their domes to help raise needed funds. They are careful to tell donors that the certificate they get denotes a contribution to a worthy institution, not the purchase of a real star name.

The Pleiades (seen through binoculars)

I rather fancy a ‘named’ star in the Pleiades as it’s one of the only constellations I can recognize.

The Pleiades

By day you cannot see the sky
For it is up so very high.
You look and look, but it's so blue
That you can never see right through.

But when night comes it is quite plain,
And all the stars are there again.
They seem just like old friends to me,
I've known them all my life you see.

There is the dipper first, and there
Is Cassiopeia in her chair,
Orion's belt, the Milky Way,
And lots I know but cannot say.

One group looks like a swarm of bees,
Papa says they're the Pleiades;
But I think they must be the toy
Of some nice little angel boy.

Perhaps his jackstones which to-day
He has forgot to put away,
And left them lying on the sky
Where he will find them bye and bye.

I wish he'd come and play with me.
We'd have such fun, for it would be
A most unusual thing for boys
To feel that they had stars for toys!

                                          Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Star Catalogues

We finally got to see Wes Anderson's new movie 'Asteroid City ' on Monday night, as weird and wonderful a cinematic experience as might have been hoped for. It's just a shame we had to go all the way to Preston for the screening, because my local cinema in Blackpool closed down last month. That's just part of a worrying trend. Cineworld and Odeon are shutting cinemas nationwide and Empire Cinemas went into administration recently. 

However, watching 'Asteroid City ' did give me the inspiration for this week's blog about  catalogues  - because up till then I confess I was feeling somewhat stumped. And by the way, it was not for nothing that Wes Anderson and his fabulous cast received a ten-minute standing ovation after the film was screened at the Cannes Festival in May. (I'll take it over 'Barbie - the movie ' any hard day's night.)

director Wes Anderson on the set of Asteroid City

Without divulging too much of the plot, suffice to say that the action takes place in 1955 in the (fictional) American desert town of the film's title, a place famous for its meteorite crater. The itinerary of the annual Junior Stargazer/ Space Cadet convention (organised to bring together students and their parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition), is spectacularly disrupted when observation of a rare astral event  reveals something totally unexpected. (Enter the alien.)

In an attempt to pinpoint the origin of this world-changing phenomenon, there is much recourse to star maps (like the one on the observatory wall - see below) and star catalogues - which is the jumping-off point for today's blog.

Asteroid City observatory with star map on the wall

Obviously enough, star catalogues are tabulations of astronomical objects, usually grouped by type, morphology, origin et cetera. They have been compiled from mankind's earliest days and the first ones were literally inscribed on clay tablets by the Ancient Babylonians of Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BC, followed chronologically by the Ancient Greeks, Chinese, Persians and Arabs, sometimes but not invariably accompanied by illustrated star charts. Interestingly, there is no evidence that the Ancient Egyptians created star catalogues though they did produce star maps which often adorned the ceilings of their tombs.

Of course the majority of early star catalogues were limited by observational capability and, as with the accompanying star maps, could be somewhat subjective. Nonetheless, they were impressive compilations, accurate enough to assist in divination, husbandry, navigation and as a means of identifying shifts in the heavens.

The invention of the telescope rapidly advanced our ability to observe and catalogue astronomical objects and with the more recent advent of powerful observatories and the arrival of radio-telescopy, it has become customary to give stars numbers rather than names.

section of a star map

My all-too-brief research into star catalogues has identified a plethora of modern ones. There have, for instance, been a dozen "full sky" catalogues created in the last 200 years by different scientific institutes. The most comprehensive of all (and I use that term very loosely) are the three Gaia catalogues (DR1, DR2, DR3) being made by the Gaia space telescope listing billions of stars. How the minds of those Ancient Babylonian and Greek astronomers would blow if they could see how far we have come in terms of stellar knowledge!

Then in addition to the comprehensive catalogues, there is another raft of specialist star catalogues listing specifically double-stars or carbon stars or stars of a particular magnitude or even simply 'nearby stars'. Then there are trigonometric parallax catalogues and proper-motion catalogues, manifold niche tabulations enough to make this modern head spin! All digital nowadays of course, because of the sheer volume of data, and much of it in the ether. I like to think of it as the Cloud Of Knowing.

To conclude, here's the latest from the imaginarium, probably still evolving if I'm honest...

Holes In Heaven

Call it numinous

for how can dark matter

so long as there are

holes in heaven

too brilliantly numerous

for terror's insinuating 

fingers to obfuscate?

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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