Figures / Marien
Marien
“hand, belonging to”
mar “hand” + -ien “belonging to”
Marien (“hand, belonging to”) is a 4-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 20° of the southern sky. Its brightest star is Sangeth, magnitude 3.80.
The story
The Dunen hold that Marien was a maker of locks who refused an inheritance and was written out of the year, and was hung up where the debt could be seen. It is a figure of the autumn, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Sangeth, the red ember, is the hand; the remaining 3 stars are counted sunwise. Those who keep the old year say nothing at all, which is considered the correct observance.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 5.19 h
- Declination
- -21.69°
- Angular span
- 20.3°
- Stars in the figure
- 4
- Best season
- autumn (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Sangeth“blood, of the” | 3.80 | M0 I | 344 pc | 3,671 K |
| bhor | Ossecorrien“bone-crown, belonging to” | 3.88 | K3 II | 65 pc | 4,711 K |
| ciel | Driftath“drift, made of” | 3.89 | G4 III | 69 pc | 5,609 K |
| dor | Orphantalol“orphan-foot, great” | 3.97 | K4 III | 105 pc | 4,554 K |
How this was made
Marien was not designed. It was grown outward from Sangeth, 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.