Figures / Tessesyleth
Tessesyleth
“tile-wind, of the”
tess “tile” + syl “wind” + -eth “of the”
Tessesyleth (“tile-wind, of the”) is a 7-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 21° of the southern sky. Its brightest star is Sarrehael, magnitude 3.50.
The story
The Noxen hold that Tessesyleth was a midwife who fell asleep during an eclipse and woke in the wrong century, and was given to the sky in place of payment. It is a figure of the summer, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Sarrehael, the cold lamp, is the knot; the remaining 6 stars are counted against the turn. Those who keep the old year keep the last window unshuttered while it passes.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 19.99 h
- Declination
- -23.08°
- Angular span
- 20.8°
- Stars in the figure
- 7
- Best season
- summer (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Sarrehael“ember-breath” | 3.50 | B7 V | 102 pc | 15,219 K |
| bhor | Nimbissune“cloud-thread, place of” | 3.63 | B9 I | 528 pc | 10,309 K |
| ciel | Carvelothen“cut-glow, the many” | 3.65 | F3 III | 221 pc | 6,998 K |
| dor | Soonai“soon, o —” | 3.77 | K5 III | 33 pc | 4,351 K |
| enn | Wendebraeien“traveller-brow, belonging to” | 4.09 | K6 III | 124 pc | 4,225 K |
| fael | KS 1592 | 4.26 | K2 III | 83 pc | 4,794 K |
| gyre | KS 1640 | 4.31 | F2 II | 136 pc | 7,124 K |
How this was made
Tessesyleth was not designed. It was grown outward from Sarrehael, 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.