Figures / Vaneis
Vaneis
“wing, little”
vane “wing” + -is “little”
Vaneis (“wing, little”) is a 6-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 15° of the equatorial sky. Its brightest star is Aura, magnitude 2.61.
The story
The Faelen hold that Vaneis was a surveyor of borders who fell asleep during an eclipse and woke in the wrong century, and is still counting, and the counting is what you see. It is a figure of the summer, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Aura, the cold lamp, is the hand; the remaining 5 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year say nothing at all, which is considered the correct observance.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 20.34 h
- Declination
- +3.67°
- Angular span
- 15.4°
- Stars in the figure
- 6
- Best season
- summer (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Aura“gold, she who is” | 2.61 | B8 V | 38 pc | 12,521 K |
| bhor | Faelvesol“maker-burning, great” | 3.36 | F2 I | 324 pc | 7,217 K |
| ciel | Veinocar“vein-eye, one who” | 3.63 | K5 I | 570 pc | 4,417 K |
| dor | Auraeraen“gold-open-sky, the many” | 3.82 | B6 I | 317 pc | 16,132 K |
| enn | Corrol“crown, great” | 3.91 | K4 III | 215 pc | 4,616 K |
| fael | KS 1568 | 4.22 | B5 V | 204 pc | 18,871 K |
How this was made
Vaneis was not designed. It was grown outward from Aura, 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.