Figures / Driftemmis
Driftemmis
“drift-lantern, little”
drift “drift” + emm “lantern” + -is “little”
Driftemmis (“drift-lantern, little”) is a 14-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 30° of the equatorial sky. Its brightest star is Braea, magnitude 3.06.
The story
The Climben hold that Driftemmis was the second child who kept a light burning for a ship that had already come home, and was let go, which was the worse sentence. It is a figure of the winter, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Braea, the ordinary sun, is the lamp; the remaining 13 stars are counted sunwise. Those who keep the old year count its stars aloud and always stop one short.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 7.61 h
- Declination
- -7.06°
- Angular span
- 29.9°
- Stars in the figure
- 14
- Best season
- winter (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Braea“bridge, she who is” | 3.06 | G5 III | 189 pc | 5,575 K |
| bhor | Loomen“loom, the many” | 3.23 | B6 V | 103 pc | 16,697 K |
| ciel | Stadesmida“standing-forge, she who is” | 3.30 | G3 III | 199 pc | 5,753 K |
| dor | Aurloomor“gold-loom, without” | 3.32 | F6 III | 200 pc | 6,473 K |
| enn | Agrasable“field-deep-dark” | 3.39 | M1 III | 179 pc | 3,528 K |
| fael | Braeth“bridge, of the” | 3.57 | F1 I | 511 pc | 7,255 K |
| gyre | Drossemereath“tide-still-water, made of” | 3.61 | B3 V | 198 pc | 22,924 K |
| hesp | Mornagraeth“tomorrow-field, of the” | 3.64 | K8 II | 137 pc | 3,818 K |
| ir | Ilmath“dawn, made of” | 3.74 | F4 II | 60 pc | 6,777 K |
| joth | Issar“thread, one who” | 3.75 | B4 V | 191 pc | 20,574 K |
| kai | Braexil“bridge-exile” | 3.98 | F7 II | 242 pc | 6,324 K |
| lune | KS 1544 | 4.19 | K9 III | 192 pc | 3,728 K |
| mor | KS 1655 | 4.33 | K8 III | 121 pc | 3,900 K |
| nix | KS 1657 | 4.33 | K8 I | 959 pc | 3,821 K |
How this was made
Driftemmis was not designed. It was grown outward from Braea, 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.