Figures / Loom
Loom
“loom”
loom “loom”
Loom (“loom”) is a 3-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 9° of the far southern sky. Its brightest star is Ziris, magnitude 3.09.
The story
The Ashen hold that Loom was a child who would not be named who kept a light burning for a ship that had already come home, and was made bright so that lying would be harder. It is a figure of the summer, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Ziris, the cold lamp, is the knot; the remaining 2 stars are counted inward. Those who keep the old year name no child in the weeks it is hidden.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 21.08 h
- Declination
- -52.97°
- Angular span
- 9.5°
- Stars in the figure
- 3
- Best season
- summer (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Ziris“high, little” | 3.09 | B6 V | 108 pc | 15,976 K |
| bhor | Sovrorphana“sovereign-orphan, she who is” | 3.28 | K3 I | 224 pc | 4,683 K |
| ciel | Anaeleth“mother-light, of the” | 4.13 | F1 I | 1.25 kpc | 7,317 K |
How this was made
Loom was not designed. It was grown outward from Ziris, 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.