Figures / Sangen
Sangen
“blood, the many”
sang “blood” + -en “the many”
Sangen (“blood, the many”) is a 11-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 40° of the far northern sky. Its brightest star is Herdetalen, magnitude 3.42.
The story
The Noxen hold that Sangen was a midwife who buried a key where no lock has yet been built, and was nailed to the cold part of the year. North of 22° it never sets, which is taken as evidence that the sentence has not ended. Herdetalen, the amber eye, is the lamp; the remaining 10 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year count its stars aloud and always stop one short.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 5.40 h
- Declination
- +68.30°
- Angular span
- 40.0°
- Stars in the figure
- 11
- Best season
- autumn (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- north of 22° latitude, where it never sets
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Herdetalen“shepherd-foot, the many” | 3.42 | K5 III | 109 pc | 4,423 K |
| bhor | Lirol“river, great” | 3.55 | B3 V | 227 pc | 24,209 K |
| ciel | Neyrol“never, great” | 3.73 | K7 I | 805 pc | 4,008 K |
| dor | Nimbenenien“cloud-rain, belonging to” | 3.76 | B3 V | 220 pc | 22,559 K |
| enn | Faelis“maker, little” | 3.80 | B6 V | 148 pc | 15,886 K |
| fael | Fennath“feather, made of” | 4.10 | B4 I | 359 pc | 20,397 K |
| gyre | KS 1557 | 4.21 | B5 V | 211 pc | 18,049 K |
| hesp | KS 1599 | 4.27 | K2 I | 494 pc | 4,916 K |
| ir | KS 1617 | 4.28 | M2 III | 73 pc | 3,389 K |
| joth | KS 1625 | 4.29 | B9 V | 67 pc | 10,831 K |
| kai | KS 1630 | 4.29 | F3 III | 193 pc | 6,963 K |
How this was made
Sangen was not designed. It was grown outward from Herdetalen, 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.