Figures / Ossa
Ossa
“bone, she who is”
oss “bone” + -a “she who is”
Ossa (“bone, she who is”) is a 7-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 17° of the far northern sky. Its brightest star is Anaherdar, magnitude 2.07.
The story
The Aelen hold that Ossa was a keeper of bees who stole the hour before dawn and could not give it back, and is still counting, and the counting is what you see. North of 31° it never sets, which is taken as evidence that the sentence has not ended. Anaherdar, the amber eye, is the eye; the remaining 6 stars are counted sunwise. Those who keep the old year will not begin a journey while it is overhead.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 0.23 h
- Declination
- +59.35°
- Angular span
- 16.7°
- Stars in the figure
- 7
- Best season
- autumn (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- north of 31° latitude, where it never sets
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Anaherdar“mother-shepherd, one who” | 2.07 | K5 I | 440 pc | 4,431 K |
| bhor | Merelothys“still-water-glow, the last” | 2.53 | A8 III | 61 pc | 7,791 K |
| ciel | Phethar“flare, one who” | 3.57 | F1 III | 215 pc | 7,261 K |
| dor | Fennevesune“feather-burning, place of” | 3.76 | B5 I | 1.15 kpc | 19,117 K |
| enn | Vessarrar“burning-ember, one who” | 4.08 | G8 III | 174 pc | 5,320 K |
| fael | KS 1586 | 4.26 | F6 III | 187 pc | 6,569 K |
| gyre | KS 1662 | 4.34 | F1 III | 171 pc | 7,330 K |
How this was made
Ossa was not designed. It was grown outward from Anaherdar, 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.