Figures / Isseclimben
Isseclimben
“thread-climbing, the many”
iss “thread” + climb “climbing” + -en “the many”
Isseclimben (“thread-climbing, the many”) is a 8-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 20° of the far southern sky. Its brightest star is Ansa, magnitude 2.72.
The story
The Orphanen hold that Isseclimben was a shepherd who fell asleep during an eclipse and woke in the wrong century, and is still counting, and the counting is what you see. It is unknown in the northern registers; the songs that mention it were all collected south of the line. Ansa, the pale coin, is the knot; the remaining 7 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
- 12.85 h
- Declination
- -66.52°
- Angular span
- 20.2°
- Stars in the figure
- 8
- Best season
- spring (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Ansa“knot” | 2.72 | F8 III | 77 pc | 6,129 K |
| bhor | Aeona“age, she who is” | 2.91 | K8 III | 95 pc | 3,820 K |
| ciel | Renmourien“heart-dusk, belonging to” | 3.11 | M1 III | 108 pc | 3,589 K |
| dor | Sulvesa“salt-burning, she who is” | 3.57 | A7 V | 21 pc | 8,127 K |
| enn | Carvol“cut, great” | 3.65 | A7 V | 24 pc | 8,123 K |
| fael | Tessevaneai“tile-wing, o —” | 3.83 | A2 V | 41 pc | 9,571 K |
| gyre | Loommere“loom-still-water” | 4.02 | A5 V | 29 pc | 8,714 K |
| hesp | KS 1604 | 4.27 | A9 V | 27 pc | 7,556 K |
How this was made
Isseclimben was not designed. It was grown outward from Ansa, 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.