Meticulous and industrious, Bonn Observatory director Friedrich W. Telescopes were revealing stars by the hundreds of thousands, every one of them an individual crying out for its own identity. Herculean Listsīy the 19th century all these naming efforts were falling far short of the mushrooming need. Roman letters were applied all over the sky by various star mappers from Bayer on, but in the northern sky they have largely passed out of use. So in far-southern constellations one often encounters upper- and lower-case Roman letters, such as g Carinae and L 2 Puppis. Nobody got around to numbering stars farther south than could be seen from England. Such confusing designations are best swept under the rug, never to be used. Thus the star 30 Monocerotis is today considered to be in Hydra, and 49 Serpentis is in Hercules. When the constellation borders were formalized in 1930, a number of Flamsteed stars found themselves stranded in exile. The highest Flamsteed number within any constellation is held by 140 Tauri. In all, 2,682 stars received Flamsteed numbers. For instance, 80 Virginis is east of 79 Virginis and west of 81 Virginis (at least in the coordinate system Flamsteed used - the equinox-1725 system - which still matches today's celestial east and west pretty well).Īll bright stars were numbered whether they had a Greek letter or not, which is why Alpha Lyrae is also 3 Lyrae. Around 1712 John Flamsteed, England's Astronomer Royal, began numbering stars in each constellation from west to east in order of right ascension - a big help when looking for a star on a map. But as more and more stars needed names because of better sky surveys, astronomers adopted numbers. Sometimes one letter is used repeatedly with superscripts to cover several adjacent stars. There are swarms of stars per constellation but only 24 Greek letters. Sooner or later everyone who deals with star names has to sit down and learn the Greek letters (listed below) and the genitives of the 88 constellation names (listed in the back of most astronomy handbooks). Back when most educated people knew Latin and Greek this phrasing flowed off the tongue naturally, but today it's many skywatchers' first exposure to the Greek alphabet and Latin declensions. They are used with the Latin genitive of the constellation name, so the leading star in Centaurus is Alpha Centauri ("Alpha of Centaurus"). He often named a constellation's brightest star Alpha, then sorted the rest into brightness classes and assigned letters within each class in order from the head to the feet of the traditional constellation figure.īayer's letters caught on immediately. ![]() In his beautiful star atlas, Uranometria, Bayer identified many stars in each constellation with lower-case Greek letters. More tractable is the Greek-letter system introduced by the German astronomer Johann Bayer in 1603. Every astronomer knows what you mean by Sirius or Polaris, but not one in 100 could identify Pishpai (Mu Geminorum), Alsciaukat (31 Lyncis), Dhur (Delta Leonis), or Zujj al Nushshabah (Gamma Sagittarii). The Bright Star Catalogue, 5th edition, lists more than 800 star names. Moreover, there are simply too many proper names to ever remember. It simply means "tail," a body part that a lot of constellations possess. But the same name has also been bestowed, at some time, on at least five other stars. ![]() "Deneb" to most people interested in astronomy means the brightest star in Cygnus. Star names are poetic and embody old constellation lore (usually in garbled Arabic), but confusion runs wild. But today proper names are widely used only for the brightest few dozen stars - and it's a good thing. Since ancient times stars, like people, have had their own proper names, such as Vega or Deneb. Another article covers the nomenclature of deep-sky objects. In this article ,we'll cover those most often encountered for star names, with their meanings and histories. Celestial nomenclature is too freakish for that, too full of schemes from times long past.įortunately, a well-rounded amateur needs to know only a tiny fraction of these naming systems. Its editors despaired of the list ever being made orderly, reasonable, or complete. The First Dictionary of the Nomenclature of Celestial Objects, 1983, described well over 1,000 different naming systems then in use, mostly for faint objects studied by professionals. Here is the constellation Taurus from Bayer's Uranometria atlas of 1603.Īt least beginners aren't alone in their confusion of star names. ![]() Johann Bayer was the first to use Greek letters for star names - and four centuries later, we use them still.
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