Figures / Carv
Carv
“cut”
carv “cut”
Carv (“cut”) is a 10-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 32° of the far southern sky. Its brightest star is Fren, magnitude 2.69.
The story
The Gapen hold that Carv was a thief who walked north until north stopped meaning anything, and was nailed to the cold part of the year. It is a figure of the spring, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Fren, the pale coin, is the knot; the remaining 9 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year count its stars aloud and always stop one short.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 12.77 h
- Declination
- -47.67°
- Angular span
- 32.4°
- Stars in the figure
- 10
- Best season
- spring (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Fren“friend” | 2.69 | F9 II | 27 pc | 6,012 K |
| bhor | Aeonren“age-heart” | 2.96 | K7 III | 74 pc | 4,038 K |
| ciel | Sooneth“soon, of the” | 3.30 | K7 I | 815 pc | 3,951 K |
| dor | Ansath“knot, made of” | 3.59 | A8 IV | 24 pc | 7,818 K |
| enn | Soonashien“soon-ash, belonging to” | 3.70 | K6 I | 334 pc | 4,134 K |
| fael | Faelfennar“maker-feather, one who” | 3.98 | A4 V | 44 pc | 8,967 K |
| gyre | Jossol“luck, great” | 4.08 | M3 I | 362 pc | 3,146 K |
| hesp | Haloneskune“deep-ice, place of” | 4.13 | A5 V | 40 pc | 8,672 K |
| ir | KS 1597 | 4.27 | F8 V | 9 pc | 6,187 K |
| joth | KS 1605 | 4.27 | B6 V | 112 pc | 15,624 K |
How this was made
Carv was not designed. It was grown outward from Fren, 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.