Figures / Driftien
Driftien
“drift, belonging to”
drift “drift” + -ien “belonging to”
Driftien (“drift, belonging to”) is a 5-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 13° of the far northern sky. Its brightest star is Sarreth, magnitude 3.44.
The story
The Orbisen hold that Driftien was an unbeliever who fell asleep during an eclipse and woke in the wrong century, and was nailed to the cold part of the year. North of 26° it never sets, which is taken as evidence that the sentence has not ended. Sarreth, the cold lamp, is the knot; the remaining 4 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
- 17.11 h
- Declination
- +64.15°
- Angular span
- 13.1°
- Stars in the figure
- 5
- Best season
- spring (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- north of 26° latitude, where it never sets
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Sarreth“ember, of the” | 3.44 | B7 V | 66 pc | 14,133 K |
| bhor | Emmesular“lantern-salt, one who” | 3.56 | A0 V | 38 pc | 9,991 K |
| ciel | Zirebraear“high-bridge, one who” | 3.79 | A6 V | 23 pc | 8,380 K |
| dor | Emmesarra“lantern-ember, she who is” | 4.10 | G2 V | 10 pc | 5,844 K |
| enn | KS 1596 | 4.27 | B5 I | 1.28 kpc | 19,849 K |
How this was made
Driftien was not designed. It was grown outward from Sarreth, 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.