Figures / Vanehaltien
Vanehaltien
“wing-halting, belonging to”
vane “wing” + halt “halting” + -ien “belonging to”
Vanehaltien (“wing-halting, belonging to”) is a 5-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 14° of the southern sky. Its brightest star is Merefenneth, magnitude 2.52.
The story
The Smiden hold that Vanehaltien was a singer with no voice who wrote a letter to no one and posted it into the wind, and was made bright so that lying would be harder. It is a figure of the autumn, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Merefenneth, the cold lamp, is the eye; the remaining 4 stars are counted against the turn. Those who keep the old year count its stars aloud and always stop one short.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 5.81 h
- Declination
- -33.30°
- Angular span
- 14.3°
- Stars in the figure
- 5
- Best season
- autumn (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Merefenneth“still-water-feather, of the” | 2.52 | B5 I | 231 pc | 19,716 K |
| bhor | Braefrenol“bridge-friend, great” | 2.74 | F3 III | 154 pc | 6,997 K |
| ciel | Lirar“river, one who” | 3.47 | B8 V | 55 pc | 12,800 K |
| dor | Dunsooneth“hill-soon, of the” | 3.96 | K3 I | 579 pc | 4,620 K |
| enn | KS 1621 | 4.28 | K2 III | 303 pc | 4,811 K |
How this was made
Vanehaltien was not designed. It was grown outward from Merefenneth, 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.