Figures / Driftecarvien
Driftecarvien
“drift-cut, belonging to”
drift “drift” + carv “cut” + -ien “belonging to”
Driftecarvien (“drift-cut, belonging to”) is a 4-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 5° of the southern sky. Its brightest star is Fughien, magnitude 3.69.
The story
The Driften hold that Driftecarvien was a woman who kept no calendar 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. Fughien, the pale coin, is the lamp; the remaining 3 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year name no child in the weeks it is hidden.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 8.23 h
- Declination
- -25.59°
- Angular span
- 4.9°
- 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 | Fughien“fleeing, belonging to” | 3.69 | F7 II | 96 pc | 6,355 K |
| bhor | KS 1527 | 4.16 | B4 V | 255 pc | 22,086 K |
| ciel | KS 1575 | 4.23 | B7 I | 560 pc | 14,888 K |
| dor | KS 1645 | 4.31 | A8 III | 239 pc | 7,738 K |
How this was made
Driftecarvien was not designed. It was grown outward from Fughien, 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.