Figures / Mourar
Mourar
“dusk, one who”
mour “dusk” + -ar “one who”
Mourar (“dusk, one who”) is a 4-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 11° of the equatorial sky. Its brightest star is Duntala, magnitude 1.92.
The story
The Phethen hold that Mourar was a midwife who refused an inheritance and was written out of the year, and is still counting, and the counting is what you see. It is a figure of the spring, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Duntala, the red ember, is the heart; the remaining 3 stars are counted against the turn. Those who keep the old year keep the last window unshuttered while it passes.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 15.29 h
- Declination
- +4.65°
- Angular span
- 11.2°
- Stars in the figure
- 4
- Best season
- spring (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Duntala“hill-foot, she who is” | 1.92 | M2 I | 422 pc | 3,303 K |
| bhor | Fenn“feather” | 3.73 | B8 V | 54 pc | 12,416 K |
| ciel | Korrecorreth“root-crown, of the” | 3.77 | K6 III | 69 pc | 4,241 K |
| dor | Ael“light” | 3.81 | A1 I | 297 pc | 9,638 K |
How this was made
Mourar was not designed. It was grown outward from Duntala, 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.