Finding the Named Stars

Last year my daughter Cory and I started learning star names during our nightly family soaks in the hot tub. We got pretty serious about it, at least when the sky was cloud-and-moon free and the nights weren’t too warm for the spa. We have identified about 100 stars with their names, which is about a third of what’s possible from our latitude and light pollution level (limiting magnitude of 5-ish).

Stars have been gathering names for thousands of years from different cultural traditions, and passed from one generation to the next orally as well as through published charts and catalogs. The International Astronomical Union (IAU), long the naming authority of newly discovered objects like comets, has been officially adopting star names only over the last five or so years. Initially inspired by the desire to name the stars that host exoplanets, the IAU Working Group on Star Names was also formed to ensure “that astronomical heritage is preserved.”

The IAU has approved 449 star names as of January 2021. About 300 of these are visible to the naked eye, perhaps 340 or so in the best of conditions. All but one of the brightest 49 stars (to mag. 2) have approved names (γ Vel at magnitude 1.7 is the lone holdout).

For a number of reasons, I wasn’t satisfied with the apps and charts I had available to find the named stars. Having played around with making star charts in the past, I decided to make my own which had the sole purpose of identifying IAU named stars. This eventually blossomed into a rather large project of cartography, statistics, database management, astrometric calculations, literature review, and some narrative. I’m about four-to-six weeks from completing the guidebook, but with some prodding from my dad I do have a nice cover finalized:

The cover uses a mashup of three images: The night sky was taken near Flagstaff using the 6.5mm fisheye at f/4 ISO 1600 for 10 minutes, tracked. This image was registered and aligned to a star chart in ArcGIS Pro, and this chart was captured separately. The figure in the bottom left is me in front of the Clark Refractor dome at Lowell Observatory, taken by Kimra in the daytime with an iPhone.