Figures / Haltefughune
Haltefughune
“halting-fleeing, place of”
halt “halting” + fugh “fleeing” + -une “place of”
Haltefughune (“halting-fleeing, place of”) is a 6-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 20° of the southern sky. Its brightest star is Smidorphaneth, magnitude 3.81.
The story
The Smiden hold that Haltefughune was a midwife who taught the tide a word it still repeats, and is kept there so the others remember the cost. It is a figure of the spring, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Smidorphaneth, the pale coin, is the wound; the remaining 5 stars are counted sunwise. Those who keep the old year still leave a cup out when it rises.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 17.35 h
- Declination
- -15.00°
- Angular span
- 20.2°
- Stars in the figure
- 6
- Best season
- spring (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Smidorphaneth“forge-orphan, of the” | 3.81 | F8 III | 177 pc | 6,222 K |
| bhor | Neyrune“never, place of” | 3.95 | K3 I | 685 pc | 4,627 K |
| ciel | Vashune“wave, place of” | 4.08 | B6 V | 111 pc | 16,055 K |
| dor | Hest“yesterday” | 4.11 | K4 III | 161 pc | 4,498 K |
| enn | Sangaeonai“blood-age, o —” | 4.12 | K3 II | 97 pc | 4,738 K |
| fael | KS 1664 | 4.34 | F9 II | 66 pc | 6,020 K |
See Smidorphaneth in the sky →
How this was made
Haltefughune was not designed. It was grown outward from Smidorphaneth, 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.