Figures / Orneth
Orneth
“shut, of the”
orn “shut” + -eth “of the”
Orneth (“shut, of the”) is a 5-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 9° of the far northern sky. Its brightest star is Korreduneth, magnitude 3.85.
The story
The Umbren hold that Orneth was a singer with no voice who unpicked the seam between one season and the next, and was hung up where the debt could be seen. North of 33° it never sets, which is taken as evidence that the sentence has not ended. Korreduneth, the amber eye, is the knot; the remaining 4 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year settle debts on the night it first clears the roofline.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 2.80 h
- Declination
- +57.05°
- Angular span
- 8.6°
- Stars in the figure
- 5
- Best season
- autumn (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- north of 33° latitude, where it never sets
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Korreduneth“root-hill, of the” | 3.85 | K3 III | 61 pc | 4,723 K |
| bhor | Vailen“veil, the many” | 4.10 | M3 I | 567 pc | 3,256 K |
| ciel | KS 1521 | 4.15 | K9 I | 305 pc | 3,749 K |
| dor | KS 1529 | 4.17 | K9 II | 50 pc | 3,780 K |
| enn | KS 1563 | 4.21 | K7 I | 396 pc | 4,036 K |
How this was made
Orneth was not designed. It was grown outward from Korreduneth, 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.