Star Names

.....Aargh.  This is the second try at this.  I've been having a number of problems with Firefox tonight, so I don't think I will be using that for posting anytime soon.  Welcome back, Internet Explorer.

....."Now that class is over, I understand how we can find out a star's mass, and size, and temperature, and composition, but what really gets me is how we can find out their names." - The punchline to what I devoutly hope is a fictional anecdote.

.....Consider the view of the night sky below.  (Credit where credit is due; here is the source of the image.)  Pick a star, any star, in the field of view.  (This is the easy part.)

.....Now, imagine how you would tell someone else which star you picked.  In order to convey what we're looking at to another, we need some way of mapping the sky.  The starting point that I'll be using in most of these will be constellations, patterns based on Romans overwriting names from the Greeks who stole a good number of the patterns from the Babylonians, who might have taken some from India.  Cosmopolitan theft.

.....An alternative would be to name individual stars, instead of groups of stars.  The downside of this is that there are more than five thousand stars visible to the eye.  If you have problems keeping track of all your relatives, imagine how difficult this would be!

.....About the brightest two hundred or so stars have individual names (I'll be including these on individual star maps for each constellations as we go), and as we'll see, most of these stars have Arabic names.  Our multicultural thefts continue!  The reason for this is that the Greek need for precision in tracking directions by the sky was not very demanding.  The Mediterranean is a physically forgiving place to navigate, especially if you just have to decide between "north along the coast" or "south along the coast".  If you needed to keep track of exactly how you were traveling in order to hit an oasis across a wide-open span of desert, you want more exact road signs, yourself.

.....Ironically, most of the stars whose names we've looked at so far come from the Latin.  "Polaris" comes from "Stella Polaris", the pole star, now located close to directly overhead at the Earth's North Pole, so it seems motionless as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere skies rotate around it.  The Greek name was "Phoenice", from their name for the constellation, along with a lot of other names in pretty much all cultures.

.....The name of the star Arcturus comes from the Greek, and apparently mean "bear-watcher".  I'll go more into the significance of this when I talk about its constellation, 

Boötes, next month.

....."Regulus" was coined by Nikolai Kopernik (Copernicus) himself, meaning "little king"

.....Spica is also from the Latin, "Spicum", or "spike" for the sheaf of wheat usually shown with Virgo (which I will not cover in depth until out next go round, next spring - I have my reasons.

.....Rising in the east, we can see three bright stars which we will later investigate as the "Summer Triangle".  "Altair", which means "eagle" in Arabic, "Vega", which means "diving eagle/vulture" in Latin, and "Deneb" which surprisingly has nothing to do with eagles, meaning "tail".  But that is for the future ...