Figures / Sarrorbis
Sarrorbis
“ember-circling”
sarr “ember” + orbis “circling”
Sarrorbis (“ember-circling”) is a 8-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 26° of the northern sky. Its brightest star is Climbael, magnitude 2.69.
The story
The Smiden hold that Sarrorbis was a lampwright who wrote a letter to no one and posted it into the wind, and is still counting, and the counting is what you see. North of 61° it never sets, which is taken as evidence that the sentence has not ended. Climbael, the pale coin, is the heart; the remaining 7 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year still leave a cup out when it rises.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 20.11 h
- Declination
- +28.57°
- Angular span
- 25.6°
- Stars in the figure
- 8
- Best season
- summer (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- north of 61° latitude, where it never sets
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Climbael“climbing-light” | 2.69 | F8 III | 92 pc | 6,095 K |
| bhor | Hesten“yesterday, the many” | 3.48 | K5 II | 184 pc | 4,383 K |
| ciel | Carvar“cut, one who” | 3.68 | B9 I | 267 pc | 10,020 K |
| dor | Dunor“hill, without” | 3.74 | K4 II | 158 pc | 4,503 K |
| enn | Isseloomor“thread-loom, without” | 3.82 | B6 IV | 169 pc | 15,690 K |
| fael | KS 1533 | 4.17 | B6 V | 176 pc | 16,010 K |
| gyre | KS 1549 | 4.20 | G6 II | 206 pc | 5,446 K |
| hesp | KS 1616 | 4.28 | B7 V | 92 pc | 13,511 K |
How this was made
Sarrorbis was not designed. It was grown outward from Climbael, 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.