Figures / Skaiaurai
Skaiaurai
“falling-gold, o —”
skai “falling” + aur “gold” + -ai “o —”
Skaiaurai (“falling-gold, o —”) is a 7-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 21° of the southern sky. Its brightest star is Athesmidar, magnitude 3.05.
The story
The Orphanen hold that Skaiaurai was a woman who kept no calendar who gave away a name and was answered by everything, and was made bright so that lying would be harder. It is a figure of the winter, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Athesmidar, the pale coin, is the hand; 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
- 9.75 h
- Declination
- -30.16°
- Angular span
- 21.0°
- 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 | Athesmidar“father-forge, one who” | 3.05 | F8 III | 57 pc | 6,236 K |
| bhor | Sarremmys“ember-lantern, the last” | 3.13 | B7 V | 50 pc | 13,524 K |
| ciel | Sarrebraeath“ember-bridge, made of” | 3.44 | G5 II | 153 pc | 5,519 K |
| dor | Lasheth“wound, of the” | 3.92 | M0 I | 308 pc | 3,673 K |
| enn | KS 1579 | 4.24 | B5 I | 440 pc | 19,929 K |
| fael | KS 1636 | 4.31 | M1 I | 518 pc | 3,598 K |
| gyre | KS 1653 | 4.33 | F6 V | 17 pc | 6,545 K |
How this was made
Skaiaurai was not designed. It was grown outward from Athesmidar, 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.