Sky watch: Beware of buying star names

With the holiday season barreling toward us, you've probably been hearing and seeing ads to have a star named after someone special.

why not take a person's money, write their name in a book, and hand them a star chart and a certificate? That's just what a handful of companies are doing, and at least one has been investigated by a state attorney general's office.

I think that having a star named after me would be a pretty cool novelty gift, but people often believe that this will buy them immortality -- that future astronomers will utter their name while studying their star. ("My, isn't Otis glowing tonight!") Sorry, folks, it just ain't so. Let me explain why.

On a clear dark night, only a couple thousand stars are visible to the unaided eye. Of those, only a few hundred are endowed with proper names. The rest, visible only to large telescopes, are designated by numbers or coordinates that astronomers list in thick star catalogs.

Take the brightest star high in the northeastern sky right now after dark. Various catalogs list it as HD34029, HR1708, and Alpha Aurigae. But since it's the sixth brightest star in the sky, it also carries a proper name: Capella. It means "she-goat," a legitimate name for the brightest star in the constellation of Auriga -- a charioteer who carries a goat. Names of other bright stars have similarly interesting origins and histories.

If you'd still like to "buy" a star this holiday season, you should have little trouble finding companies on the Internet, but please be aware that most stars they're "selling" are too faint to see with the unaided eye. In fact, some may not even exist at all.Nearly two decades ago I failed to find a friend's star with a 21-inch telescope -- both with my eye and camera. It just wasn't there. And then I discovered upon closer examination that the star for which the person spent $50 was actually a dot of ink laid down on the star chart by some unscrupulous salesperson!

To learn more about the stars' actual names, you might check out the book of Richard Hinckley Allen: "Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning." And for an even more in-depth and fascinating look at the subject, check out the classic three-volume tome known as "Burnham's Celestial Handbook."