Figures / Iren
Iren
“anger, the many”
ire “anger” + -en “the many”
Iren (“anger, the many”) is a 4-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 18° of the far northern sky. Its brightest star is Dunhestol, magnitude 3.97.
The story
The Soonen hold that Iren was a debtor who measured the sky and found it one hand too small, and is still counting, and the counting is what you see. North of 22° it never sets, which is taken as evidence that the sentence has not ended. Dunhestol, the amber eye, is the lamp; the remaining 3 stars are counted against the turn. Those who keep the old year settle debts on the night it first clears the roofline.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 12.10 h
- Declination
- +67.80°
- Angular span
- 18.2°
- Stars in the figure
- 4
- Best season
- spring (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- north of 22° latitude, where it never sets
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Dunhestol“hill-yesterday, great” | 3.97 | K2 I | 655 pc | 4,815 K |
| bhor | Meren“still-water, the many” | 4.12 | B7 V | 94 pc | 14,435 K |
| ciel | KS 1551 | 4.20 | A9 III | 152 pc | 7,622 K |
| dor | KS 1610 | 4.28 | M2 I | 1.15 kpc | 3,389 K |
How this was made
Iren was not designed. It was grown outward from Dunhestol, 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.