Figures / Vanelothys
Vanelothys
“wing-glow, the last”
vane “wing” + loth “glow” + -ys “the last”
Vanelothys (“wing-glow, the last”) is a 13-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 39° of the far southern sky. Its brightest star is Aurar, magnitude 1.45.
The story
The Sulen hold that Vanelothys was a cartographer who counted every stone in the river and forgot her own name doing it, and is still counting, and the counting is what you see. It is unknown in the northern registers; the songs that mention it were all collected south of the line. Aurar, the cold lamp, is the heart; the remaining 12 stars are counted against the turn. Those who keep the old year still leave a cup out when it rises.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 16.73 h
- Declination
- -62.08°
- Angular span
- 39.3°
- Stars in the figure
- 13
- Best season
- spring (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Aurar“gold, one who” | 1.45 | B8 V | 20 pc | 12,174 K |
| bhor | Vesaurol“burning-gold, great” | 3.10 | A3 V | 30 pc | 9,193 K |
| ciel | Renune“heart, place of” | 3.50 | K2 II | 80 pc | 4,928 K |
| dor | Garnashys“stone-ash, the last” | 3.51 | M1 III | 60 pc | 3,578 K |
| enn | Vesemmor“burning-lantern, without” | 3.60 | G4 III | 148 pc | 5,617 K |
| fael | Ossefrenien“bone-friend, belonging to” | 3.66 | K8 III | 58 pc | 3,873 K |
| gyre | Talen“foot, the many” | 3.75 | M2 III | 68 pc | 3,305 K |
| hesp | Thirien“iron, belonging to” | 3.88 | M2 III | 91 pc | 3,442 K |
| ir | Kellothen“key-glow, the many” | 3.93 | F1 III | 252 pc | 7,360 K |
| joth | KS 1539 | 4.18 | B4 V | 230 pc | 21,987 K |
| kai | KS 1554 | 4.21 | G4 II | 207 pc | 5,665 K |
| lune | KS 1574 | 4.23 | B6 V | 114 pc | 16,119 K |
| mor | KS 1638 | 4.31 | G2 II | 118 pc | 5,836 K |
How this was made
Vanelothys was not designed. It was grown outward from Aurar, 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.