Figures / Ansastadol
Ansastadol
“knot-standing, great”
ansa “knot” + stad “standing” + -ol “great”
Ansastadol (“knot-standing, great”) is a 7-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 15° of the northern sky. Its brightest star is Kelsarrys, magnitude 1.12.
The story
The Braen hold that Ansastadol was a bell-founder who counted every stone in the river and forgot her own name doing it, and was let go, which was the worse sentence. North of 58° it never sets, which is taken as evidence that the sentence has not ended. Kelsarrys, the cold lamp, is the lamp; the remaining 6 stars are counted against the turn. Those who keep the old year count its stars aloud and always stop one short.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 5.56 h
- Declination
- +31.68°
- Angular span
- 15.4°
- Stars in the figure
- 7
- Best season
- autumn (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- north of 58° latitude, where it never sets
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Kelsarrys“key-ember, the last” | 1.12 | B3 V | 71 pc | 22,840 K |
| bhor | Aela“light, she who is” | 2.16 | F4 III | 75 pc | 6,846 K |
| ciel | Lirys“river, the last” | 2.75 | B4 V | 140 pc | 21,513 K |
| dor | Korresanga“root-blood, she who is” | 3.57 | K6 III | 46 pc | 4,177 K |
| enn | Mereskien“still-water-ice, belonging to” | 3.61 | B7 I | 473 pc | 15,072 K |
| fael | Osseth“bone, of the” | 3.73 | K8 I | 554 pc | 3,852 K |
| gyre | Frensoona“friend-soon, she who is” | 4.08 | K8 III | 220 pc | 3,852 K |
How this was made
Ansastadol was not designed. It was grown outward from Kelsarrys, 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.