Figures / Aeraien
Aeraien
“open-sky, belonging to”
aera “open-sky” + -ien “belonging to”
Aeraien (“open-sky, belonging to”) is a 8-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 8° of the southern sky. Its brightest star is Lotha, magnitude 3.54.
The story
The Wenden hold that Aeraien was a maker of locks who gave away a name and was answered by everything, and was let go, which was the worse sentence. It is a figure of the winter, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Lotha, the cold lamp, is the knot; the remaining 7 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year keep the last window unshuttered while it passes.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 8.69 h
- Declination
- -24.53°
- Angular span
- 7.6°
- Stars in the figure
- 8
- Best season
- winter (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Lotha“glow, she who is” | 3.54 | B4 V | 171 pc | 21,446 K |
| bhor | Garneneyror“stone-never, without” | 3.73 | K6 III | 137 pc | 4,126 K |
| ciel | Agrossis“field-bone, little” | 3.83 | M2 III | 150 pc | 3,406 K |
| dor | Talherdath“foot-shepherd, made of” | 4.08 | K1 III | 224 pc | 5,036 K |
| enn | Stad“standing” | 4.08 | F5 III | 239 pc | 6,681 K |
| fael | Braelirar“bridge-river, one who” | 4.10 | B3 V | 247 pc | 23,245 K |
| gyre | KS 1538 | 4.18 | K3 III | 241 pc | 4,760 K |
| hesp | KS 1589 | 4.26 | B6 V | 173 pc | 17,649 K |
How this was made
Aeraien was not designed. It was grown outward from Lotha, the brightest star in this part of the sky that had not already been claimed by another figure, absorbing near neighbours until it ran out of them — which is, near enough, how the constellations of the real sky came about. Its name is Ilmenic, an invented agglutinative language: every name on this site decomposes into morphemes and can be translated.