Resonant Constellation

I have gmail for my personal email, and as such, I often get unobtrusive ads on the side of my email messages relating to the subject of the mail. Since I’m going observing this weekend, I was corresponding with my colleagues about certain technical details of our impending observations. I saw a link on the side near the bottom-one I’m sure most people out there have come across once or twice-a service claiming to be able to sell you the ‘rights’ to “name a star!” Oh boy.

Since I had just discussed how idiotic just such a practice is with my friend Pete a few hours ago, I decided to click the link to remind myself of the idiocy. They claim that there is only one star registry which is copywrite protected with the US patent office (theirs, of course). The go on to further claim that the International Star Registry has allowed thousands of people to name their own stars. The price they charge for this is between $50 and $500. What do you get for this? A certificate and a star chart. The different framing options make up the order of magnitude price difference.

Okay, first of all, I hope I don’t have to tell you that this so-called ’star registry’ is completely bogus. It is entirely meaningless and certainly not worth $50 (much less $500). Secondly, there are only a few thousand stars which are visible to the human eye. Most of these have popular names, and all of them are named in more than one catalog (names like GL 436, LHS 310, 2MASS J11421096+2642251, etcetera. By the way, those are all the same star, which has at least 30 different catalog designations). I’ve got to assume that they’re going just a bit deeper into the magnitude scale and assigning people stars that they can’t actually see. Fair enough, I can see no fault with that, but most people (especially ones gullible enough to fall for this) will probably be expecting to be able to look up and point at “their” star.

My favorite part of this idiocy, however, was their last sentence:

There are still a few stars left to be named but you must act quickly to secure a good one before they run out.

(emphasis in original)

They run out. Nevermind that there are more stars in just our galaxy than there have been humans who ever lived, more stars than you could possibly imagine-roughly a hundred billion. Clearly, stars are a limited commodity. Sometimes, I feel like time spent educating people might be better spent banging the instructor’s head on the wall. At least they’d have a big bruise to show for it.

If you REALLY want to name your own stars, do what my friend Dave did before he learned the names of the stars and constellations. He went outside, looked up, and made it all up himself. If you really want, you could make your own certificate and draw a star chart of what you see to remind yourself of where the stars you named are. In all honesty, though, I’d simply suggest leaving out the naming stuff and just stargazing. To paraphrase Feynmann, names don’t tell you anything useful about the object, they sometimes just get in the way.