Monthly Archives: August 2008

astronomy, star names

The Star Name Game

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Mid-August Star Musings

I’m a sucker for cool names of astronomy objects. The monickers for stars have come down to us through the ages or from data catalogs that list distant and dimmer stars. On any given night you can look up at the sky and see a bright star with a name like Gomeisa or a dimmer one that may simply have a few letters and a number that denote its name — like HIP80001.  Open up just about any stargazing book and you’ll find lists of the brighter stars, and all of them have “word” names like Alnath or some such. There are also more than a few web sites with those lists, like Skyeye (which not only gives you the  name of the star, but a star chart showing how to find it).

So, I was idly scrolling through the list at SkyEye and got to thinking that these make some dandy first names for characters in science fiction (or even a newborn baby, if you’re daring enough). For writers, it’s kind of fun to make a game of it. For example, say you are REALLY stuck for a name for the hero of your new science fiction adventure. Simply go to the list and for the first name of the person, pick one star name.  You need a last name, so select the name of something like your favorite sports team*, or your favorite make of automobile and append the term “-walker” or “-fighter” or “-gazer” to the end of it.  Thus, you get names like Baiten Kaitos Bronco-walker or Nunki Pirate-fighter or Regulus Eclipse-gazer.

Now, for babies, you probably need to be a little more circumspect (not the least because you DO have to explain this one to your in-laws at some point).  So, I wouldn’t suggest saddling your kid with Rukbat or Scheat or Sualocin (which kind of sounds like the name of a new drug for for skin rashes).  But, Maia is rather nice, as is Vega or Shaula or Mira, or Caroli.

If you do that for your kid, then you’ll (of course) have to take them out when they get big enough so you can show them the star they’re named after.  It’s far better (and much more sensible, not to mention cost-effective) than paying to name a star and then finding out that the name you paid for isn’t official…

(*This probably won’t work too well with Manchester United, although Arsenal could squeak through… just sayin’… )

cassini mission, enceladus, planetary science, planets

Going South for the Summer

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Cassini at Enceladus: More!  More!

These are the infamous tiger stripes in the region on Enceladus where Cassini scientists spotted material coming out of vents.  It’s a false-color mosaic–meaning that several sets of images from the Imaging Subsystem were pieced together and colored to highlight specific units of the surface that scientists want to study. Here’s what the Cassini mission press release has to say about this image:

Areas that are greenish in appearance are believed to represent deposits of coarser grained ice and solid boulders that are too small to be seen at this scale, but which are visible in the higher resolution views, while whitish deposits represent finer grained ice. The mosaic shows that coarse-grained and solid ice are concentrated along valley floors and walls, as well as along the upraised flanks of the “tiger stripe” fractures, which may be covered with plume fallout that landed not far from the sources. Elsewhere on Enceladus, this coarse water ice is concentrated within outcrops along cliff faces and at the top of ridges. The sinuous boundary of scarps and ridges that encircles the south polar terrain at about 55 degrees south latitude is conspicuous. Much of the coarse-grained or solid ice along this boundary may be blocky rubble that has crumbled off of cliff faces as a result of ongoing seismic activity.

Wouldn’t it be fun to hike this area? Perhaps in the future, planetary geologists will bring their equipment here to sample the surface, measure its properties, and give all of us here on Earth the ultimate close-up pictures of this fascinating moon.

Just to give you an idea what Voyager 2 saw, here’s the image we all marvelled over 27 years ago this month. Even then, we were all fascinated with the juxtaposed terrains and mysterious cracks on this icy surface.  What a difference nearly three decades makes!

I’ve written before about the scene at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that night, when Enceladus showed us her stuff. It was a noisy, wonderful experience, made even  more exciting by the fact that when this picture came down from the Deep Space Network and scanned across the screen, it was during a live broadcast of Nightline. A lot of science writers and planetary scientists were standing around watching, and thus we were all together in one big happy family jabbering to each other about what we were seeing on the screens. We made so much noise when we saw the pics that the floor directors for Nightline had to shush us several times, pretty much to no avail!  Hey… we were watching planetary science history unfold before our eyes.  With all due respect to Ted Koppel, Enceladus was far more fetching and mysterious, and we weren’t going to let the chance go by to do instant science interpretation on that amazing image!