Figures / Tessis
Tessis
“tile, little”
tess “tile” + -is “little”
Tessis (“tile, little”) is a 6-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 14° of the northern sky. Its brightest star is Emmephethath, magnitude 2.09.
The story
The Mouren hold that Tessis was a cartographer who walked north until north stopped meaning anything, and is still counting, and the counting is what you see. North of 50° it never sets, which is taken as evidence that the sentence has not ended. Emmephethath, the pale coin, is the eye; the remaining 5 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year settle debts on the night it first clears the roofline.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 10.32 h
- Declination
- +40.37°
- Angular span
- 13.6°
- Stars in the figure
- 6
- Best season
- winter (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- north of 50° latitude, where it never sets
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Emmephethath“lantern-flare, made of” | 2.09 | F7 III | 23 pc | 6,360 K |
| bhor | Carvewend“cut-traveller” | 3.61 | G2 V | 8 pc | 5,824 K |
| ciel | Vashilmath“wave-dawn, made of” | 3.87 | B5 I | 351 pc | 18,856 K |
| dor | Veslothune“burning-glow, place of” | 3.94 | F8 III | 40 pc | 6,226 K |
| enn | Emmissis“lantern-thread, little” | 3.98 | F8 V | 12 pc | 6,202 K |
| fael | Corris“crown, little” | 4.00 | M3 II | 119 pc | 3,246 K |
How this was made
Tessis was not designed. It was grown outward from Emmephethath, 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.