Figures / Skaiar
Skaiar
“falling, one who”
skai “falling” + -ar “one who”
Skaiar (“falling, one who”) is a 7-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 20° of the far southern sky. Its brightest star is Aerasarrune, magnitude 0.24.
The story
The Herden hold that Skaiar was a keeper of bees who fell asleep during an eclipse and woke in the wrong century, and was set turning and has not been released. It is a figure of the winter, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Aerasarrune, the cold lamp, is the eye; the remaining 6 stars are counted sunwise. Those who keep the old year say nothing at all, which is considered the correct observance.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 10.30 h
- Declination
- -54.63°
- Angular span
- 19.6°
- Stars in the figure
- 7
- Best season
- winter (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Aerasarrune“open-sky-ember, place of” | 0.24 | B7 I | 99 pc | 14,752 K |
| bhor | Garnys“stone, the last” | 3.20 | K4 I | 722 pc | 4,559 K |
| ciel | Agradreaden“field-fear, the many” | 3.62 | M2 I | 528 pc | 3,301 K |
| dor | Skailothien“falling-glow, belonging to” | 3.73 | G1 II | 92 pc | 5,902 K |
| enn | Nenien“rain, belonging to” | 3.83 | A0 V | 41 pc | 9,894 K |
| fael | Nimbath“cloud, made of” | 3.93 | B6 I | 361 pc | 17,030 K |
| gyre | KS 1618 | 4.28 | A3 V | 47 pc | 9,284 K |
How this was made
Skaiar was not designed. It was grown outward from Aerasarrune, 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.