Figures / Cynlothath
Cynlothath
“white-glow, made of”
cyn “white” + loth “glow” + -ath “made of”
Cynlothath (“white-glow, made of”) is a 4-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 12° of the northern sky. Its brightest star is Vesai, magnitude 0.97.
The story
The Dreaden hold that Cynlothath was the second child who counted every stone in the river and forgot her own name doing it, and was made bright so that lying would be harder. It is a figure of the winter, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Vesai, the ordinary sun, is the hand; the remaining 3 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year say nothing at all, which is considered the correct observance.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 6.05 h
- Declination
- +19.81°
- Angular span
- 12.0°
- Stars in the figure
- 4
- Best season
- winter (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Vesai“burning, o —” | 0.97 | G0 III | 73 pc | 5,988 K |
| bhor | Nimbefenna“cloud-feather, she who is” | 2.87 | A3 V | 27 pc | 9,156 K |
| ciel | Phethemmis“flare-lantern, little” | 3.94 | G9 III | 64 pc | 5,207 K |
| dor | KS 1559 | 4.21 | G4 III | 274 pc | 5,615 K |
How this was made
Cynlothath was not designed. It was grown outward from Vesai, 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.