Figures / Aerath
Aerath
“open-sky, made of”
aera “open-sky” + -ath “made of”
Aerath (“open-sky, made of”) is a 13-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 20° of the equatorial sky. Its brightest star is Frenfaelys, magnitude 2.24.
The story
The Nuncen hold that Aerath was a drowned sailor who counted every stone in the river and forgot her own name doing it, and was nailed to the cold part of the year. It is a figure of the winter, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Frenfaelys, the pale coin, is the wound; the remaining 12 stars are counted sunwise. Those who keep the old year name no child in the weeks it is hidden.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 6.49 h
- Declination
- -8.28°
- Angular span
- 20.5°
- Stars in the figure
- 13
- Best season
- winter (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Frenfaelys“friend-maker, the last” | 2.24 | F4 III | 80 pc | 6,862 K |
| bhor | Issaurien“thread-gold, belonging to” | 3.54 | F8 V | 9 pc | 6,093 K |
| ciel | Grievedhuar“grief-smoke, one who” | 3.56 | M1 II | 144 pc | 3,593 K |
| dor | Haloneskol“deep-ice, great” | 3.61 | B7 I | 509 pc | 14,621 K |
| enn | Faelnimben“maker-cloud, the many” | 3.62 | B5 I | 473 pc | 19,633 K |
| fael | Kelvasha“key-wave, she who is” | 3.74 | B4 V | 189 pc | 20,303 K |
| gyre | Neyrrenar“never-heart, one who” | 3.86 | K8 III | 67 pc | 3,811 K |
| hesp | Aeonwendar“age-traveller, one who” | 3.96 | K2 I | 588 pc | 4,823 K |
| ir | Braecarva“bridge-cut, she who is” | 4.02 | B6 V | 126 pc | 15,630 K |
| joth | KS 1543 | 4.18 | B3 V | 290 pc | 23,162 K |
| kai | KS 1566 | 4.22 | A2 V | 43 pc | 9,339 K |
| lune | KS 1603 | 4.27 | A6 V | 28 pc | 8,252 K |
| mor | KS 1607 | 4.28 | M0 III | 83 pc | 3,665 K |
How this was made
Aerath was not designed. It was grown outward from Frenfaelys, 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.