Well this is kind of cool. The Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn took a fabulous view of the Pleiades as a “calibration” test for its camera electronics.

You can see some of the nebulosity that makes up the reflection nebula around several of the hundreds of stars that make up the Pleiades. It’s a nice, clear shot that I imagine lots of amateur astrophoto enthusiasts would love to get.

The Pleaides is one of my favorite clusters to watch, and every year I await its appearance in our autumn skies. It’s such a famous cluster and many cultures have stories about it in their star-lore. A few years ago I wrote a planetarium show that included the lore of the Pleiades in one section and I had a blast digging out stories like the one about the hen and her chicks, the seven sisters, the seven maidens, the little eyes of the heavens, the herd of camels, the Japanese name “Subaru,” and many, many others. One of the best write-ups was in a book called Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, Vol. 3, where the author compiled a culturally rich guide to this cluster. While the book is in need of updating with some more recent scientific discoveries, it’s still a treasure trove of information.

The Pleiades come in for a LOT of attention from fringe believers who think that some ancient civilization is visiting us from the Pleiades and bringing “enlightenment” and other useful goodies like using mind energy to go into other realms. It’s all very amusing, and useful to distinguish people who are interested in science from those who will believe anything if somebody plasters a mysterious astronomy-sounding name on it.

Truth is, the Pleiades are all hot young blue stars that formed sometime over the last 100 million years is too young for a star to have formed any planets around it (provided there’s anything left over from the starbirth sequence to form planets). So, if there’s a planet out there full of loving, helpful beings who are beaming their thought energy toward us, nobody’s seen it yet. The evidence just isn’t there.

This doesn’t mean the Pleiades aren’t an interesting bunch to study. There ARE brown dwarfs among the Pleiades stars, but these aren’t planets. They’re substellar objects that are somewhere between a giant planet and a small star, and they do NOT have nuclear fusion at their cores (as stars do). There are also white dwarfs in the cluster, which seems a little strange for such a young cluster. Most white dwarfs take longer than the life of the Pleiades to evolve. But, these white dwarfs could well be the remains of very massive stars that are born hot, live fast, die young, and leave shrunken little bodies behind to glow for millions or billions of years. Bad news for Pleiadeans believers: those stars would not have lived long enough to evolve planets with life on them either, or the planets would have been destroyed when the original stars lost much of their mass in old age. But, great news for astronomers, since this cluster gives us a great testbed to study stars at both ends of the age spectrum and categorize their chemical makeup and how they influence space around them!

I knew that no good would come of all this messing around by the IAU. Today’s news brings me a story in The Australian, labeled “breaking news” no less, about a professor who is pleading with the IAU to “keep the universe Greek.” Apparently this fellow, who is director of the Athens Observatory in Greece (and therefore has something of a vested interest in all things Greek) is shocked (shocked, I tell you) that Mike Brown of Caltech has been referring to asteroid 2003 UB313 as “Xena.” Mind you, Dr. Brown isn’t suggesting that as the proper name for this body, but he did it as a sort of tribute to the folks who have searched for Planet X all these years. And, to be fair, he IS playing by IAU rules in that he has 9 years to come up with a proper, approved name for his discovery.

This seems to make no difference to Dr. Christos Goudis of the Athens Observatory. He’s insisting that astronomy’s deep roots should be maintained—apparently as long as those roots begin with the Greek naming and heritage of sky objects.

Well, I have some news for Dr. Goudis. With all due respect to the tremendous contributions the Greeks made to astronomy and science (and they are considerable), astronomy as a science and in nomenclature didn’t start with the Greeks. There have been just a few other people over the centuries who have made good contributions, too. For example, anybody of Assyrian descent could feel rightly slighted that we’re being forced to call that ringed planet “Saturn,” instead of the older and more ominous-sounding “Lubadsagush.” That’s a name that dates back well before the dawn of Greek civilization.

Or, how about that famous Babylonian planet, Nirgal? Also known as Salbatanu to the ancient Akkadians. Also known as Horus the Red to the Egyptians, Nabu to the Babylonians, Verethragna to the Persians, and Artagnes to other Persians well before it became Pyroeis to the early Greeks, Ares to the later Greeks, and finally Mars to the Romans and the rest of us. Which name gets priority in this lengthy and ancient progression that stretches back well beyond many early cultures?

Okay, so you get the point. The naming of parts in the sky is a mishmash, as anybody who’s read star charts will agree.Personally I kind of like a lot of the Arabic names enshrined “up there” along with Greek and Latin and all sorts of other naming conventions. The point here is that there’s not one ethnic or cultural group that has primacy over star names, planet names, or anything. It’s the job of the IAU to keep the names straight. I think the gentleman from Athens should calm down, have some ouzo, and remember that even the Greeks (who gave us so many interesting things culturally and scientifically) were preceded and postceded by others who also had good things to contribute. And frankly, the temporary name “Xena” isn’t worth kvetching over, let alone sending impassioned pleas to the IAU about.