Some companies make money by selling opportunities to name stars, while others make money by selling them to a loved one. Is it worth the money?
If you've ever considered purchasing a star for the purpose of attaching your name or a friend's name, you should read this before you make the purchase.
Some companies allow you to name a star. Usually, for a few tens of dollars, they will send you a fancy looking certificate and a chart from a star atlas showing the precise position of your star.
The problem is that the star name that you purchased is not officially recognized by any scientific or astronomy organization.
If you named a star for your Aunt Clara, don't bother visiting your local observatory and ask to have them show it to you, even if the name is in the ledger of the company that sent you that nice certificate.
You can see the night sky this month.
Over the course of 20 years, I answered literally thousands of questions about astronomy and its affiliated sciences while I was the question-and-answer man at New York's Hayden Planetarium. When we got close to a holiday, the questions regarding the purchase of a star always increased.
Many would ask if we could use our projector to show their star.
Others wanted to know if they could buy a star directly through us, or if we could suggest a company where they could do it.
My answer to all three of them was a resounding no.
The IAU has their own take on this topic.
The IAU explains on its website that such names have no official validity. Similar rules apply to star clusters and galaxies as well.
There are ways to get around this, as a couple of 19th century Sicilian astronomer, and a well-known 20th century astronauts quietly demonstrated.
Let's deal with the Sicilian astronomer first.
Delphinus, the Dolphin is visible at the first light of dawn, halfway up in the eastern sky, as we transition from winter to spring. Despite its small size and the fact that it only consists of faint stars, it attracted the attention of ancient watchers of the sky because they were able to see it on dark, clear nights.
The constellation looks like a small diamond with a few stars below it. Some reference books refer to the diamond as Job's Coffin, though the origin of this name is unknown.
There are two stars in the Delphinus diamond with strange names. Giuseppe Piazzi, the director of the Palermo Observatory, published these names in the Palermo Star Catalog in 1814.
Nobody seemed to have a clue as to the origin of those names, who eventually found their way into numerous other star charts and atlases.
The English astronomer Thomas Webb solved the mystery by reversing his letters and revealing the Latinized form of Niccolo Cacciatore. Nobody knows if it was Piazzi or Cacciatore who christened these two stars.
We know that Cacciatore didn't pay a cent to have his name in the sky.
There are three stars with names that were once referred to three American astronauts.
The Apollo craft that took men to the moon was designed to operate under the guidance of a gyros. The system had to be adjusted by seeing on known stars. They used 37 stars.
The crew for the first manned Apollo flight were named in 1966. At that time, Dr. Clarence H. Cleminshaw, who was the director of Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory, approached him and asked him to write an article about the Apollo navigation stars. The three bogus star names were passed along by Grissom. The list was published in the Griffith Observer which is considered to be a good publication.
What were the names?
The star Iota Ursae Majoris was also known as Dnoces, Navi, and Regor.
Dnoces is a reference to the ordinal number often appended to Edward White, II, who was also the second man to walk in space. The first name of Chaffee was in reverse, and his middle name was Ivan.
The three maverick stars were accorded the same respect as the celebrated ones. They found official star maps that were published in the late 1960s and 1970s. Sky and Telescope magazine published monthly star charts for these three stars from 1968 until 1993.
Today, the names are classified by most reference sources as "disused" or "never really used". The Apollo 1 command module was engulfed in a fire on January 27, 1967.
The instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium is Joe Rao. He writes about astronomy for a number of publications. Follow us on social media.
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