I love it when we get conversations going in comments here. I wish I had time to administer a bulletin board system, but right now work is keeping me from having that time. The work is great, by the way. The exhibits are coming along, the writing is great fun!

So, the current conversation about “fear of science” reminds me that we, as humans, do what we can to “humanize” science. This brings us to things like planetarium shows and places like science museums. And that’s great, although I do sometimes think that having a special museum for science, or even art for that matter, gives people the idea that science (or art) is something you have to go experience. Rather we should remember that science is all around us — or rather, the processes that science describes, occur all around us. We ARE science, just like we ARE starstuff.

One of the “humanizing” efforts in astronomy is this whole deal about paying some company to take a star and attach your (or someone else’s) name to it. That’s kind of strange, I think, since you can go out and do this for free. You don’t have to pay some company for a cheap certificate and a (sometimes) illegally copied star map with a circle around a star that somehow implies that you just bought the naming rights, like some beer company naming a stadium. Somehow these companies make it look like you’re getting something more for your money though: the chance to have everybody else (usually implying “official astronomers”) call that star by your name.

It just isn’t so, and all the advertising and hearts and flowers in the world isn’t going to make it so. Offering to put the name in a book locked in a Swiss bank vault isn’t going to make it any more official, either.

But, the stars ARE yours. The official names (or non-official ones written in books squirrelled away in some vault), don’t change that. You can go out, anytime, and look up. Fortunately, nobody’s figured out a way to charge you for access to your own backyard and a view of the stars.

I bring this up because companies who stick names on stellar objects do advertise using Google, and occasionally their ads do show up here (even though I filter such stuff out). So, I DO NOT condone such sales, but if an ad slips through, there’s not much I can do about it, even if I have filtered them out. Same with some other whack ads which have shown up here recently. Maybe I should just figure that people are intelligent enough to figure out what’s honest and what isn’t, but the star-monicker business pushes a few buttons for me. I’ve had experiences with people coming up to me after talks and proudly showing me the star they had called after their dearly departed loved one, telling me how proud they were that the whole astronomy community was going to be calling it “Bob’s Star” in perpetuity. And instead of the companies having to deal with the hurt feelings when we tell them people that they’ve kinda wasted their money on something that isn’t quite what they were led to believe, the backsplash comes back to us who love the stars too dearly to imagine them being used in activities that promise things that are usually just too good to be true.