Week of Nov. 29 -- Dec. 5, 2009 by Dennis Mammana on Creators.com

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Week of Nov. 29 -- Dec. 5, 2009

With the holiday season racing toward us like an out-of-control train, it won't be long before we begin seeing and hearing ads to have a star named after someone special.

Now, I'm a huge proponent of the free enterprise system, but, much like P.T. Barnum, I've come to learn that no matter how goofy a product is, if it's marketed well enough, people will line up to buy it. Remember the pet rock? Case closed.

So if rocks, why not stars? Why not take a person's hard-earned money, write their name in a book and hand them a star chart and certificate? Well, that's just what a handful of companies have been doing for several years, and at least one has been investigated by one state's 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 someday utter their name while studying "their" star. I can just hear it now: "My, isn't Otis glistening 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 came 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 can be found in star catalogues.

Take, for example, the brightest star in the northeastern sky right now after dark. Various catalogues list it as HD 34029, HR 1708 and Alpha Aurigae. But since it's the sixth-brightest star in the heavens, 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. Other bright stars have similar histories.

Now, if you'd still like to "buy" a star for someone this holiday season, you should have little trouble finding companies on any Internet search engine. But if you'd like to learn how the stars got their actual names, you might check out the classic book of Richard Hinckley Allen: "Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning."

I suspect even ol' Barnum might approve.

To find out more about Dennis Mammana and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.