Week of December 11-17, 2011: Naming the Stars by Dennis Mammana on Creators.com

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Week of December 11-17, 2011: Naming the Stars

With the holiday season barreling toward us like an out-of-control sleigh, you've probably been hearing and seeing ads to have a star named after someone special.

Now, I have nothing against the free enterprise system. But like P.T. Barnum, I have come to learn that no matter how ridiculous a product, if it's marketed well enough people will line up to buy it. Remember the pet rock?

So if rocks, why not stars? Why not take a person's money, write their name in a book, and hand them a star chart and a certificate? Well, that's just what a handful of companies are doing, and at least one has been investigated by a state attorney general's office.

Quite frankly, I think that having a star named after me would be a pretty cool novelty gift, but that's really all it is. Where I take issue is that people often believe that this will buy them immortality — that future astronomers will utter their name while studying their star. ("My, isn't Otis glowing tonight!")

Sorry, folks, it just ain't so. Let me explain why.

On a clear dark night, only a couple thousand stars are visible to the unaided eye. Of those, only a few hundred are endowed with proper names, most of which come from ancient stargazers of the Mediterranean: the Greeks, Romans, Arabs and others. The rest, visible only to large telescopes, are designated by numbers or celestial coordinates that astronomers list in thick star catalogues.

Take, for example, the brightest star high in the northeastern sky right now after dark.

Various catalogues list it as HD34029, HR1708, and Alpha Aurigae. But since it's the sixth brightest star in the sky, it also carries a proper name: Capella. The name means "she-goat," a perfectly legitimate name for the brightest star in the constellation of Auriga — a charioteer who carries a goat. Names of other bright stars have similarly interesting origins and histories.

Now if you'd still like to "buy" a star for someone this holiday season, you certainly won't hurt my feelings. You should have little trouble finding companies on any Internet search engine, but please be aware that most of the stars they're "selling" are much too faint to see with the unaided eye.

In fact, some may not even exist at all. Nearly two decades ago I failed to find a friend's star with a 21-inch telescope — both with my eye and camera. It just wasn't there. And then I discovered upon closer examination that the star for which the person spent $50 was actually a dot of ink laid down on the star chart by some unscrupulous salesperson!

Star names are truly fascinating, and they tell us much about the cultures that created them. To learn more about the stars' actual names, you might check out the book of Richard Hinckley Allen: "Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning." And for an even more in-depth and fascinating look at the subject, check out the classic three-volume tome known as "Burnham's Celestial Handbook."

Come to think of it, books like that might make a more useful gift for the stargazer in your family!

Visit Dennis Mammana at www.dennismammana.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.