Figures / Veseskaia
Veseskaia
“burning-falling, she who is”
ves “burning” + skai “falling” + -a “she who is”
Veseskaia (“burning-falling, she who is”) is a 9-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 33° of the southern sky. Its brightest star is Lothefael, magnitude 2.75.
The story
The Skaien hold that Veseskaia was a woman who kept no calendar who carried water uphill for forty years without spilling it, and was given to the sky in place of payment. It is a figure of the spring, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Lothefael, the cold lamp, is the lamp; the remaining 8 stars are counted inward. Those who keep the old year still leave a cup out when it rises.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 15.81 h
- Declination
- -22.68°
- Angular span
- 32.9°
- Stars in the figure
- 9
- Best season
- spring (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Lothefael“glow-maker” | 2.75 | B6 V | 92 pc | 16,392 K |
| bhor | Ves“burning” | 2.87 | G6 II | 161 pc | 5,472 K |
| ciel | Anapyrys“mother-ash-heap, the last” | 3.72 | K6 III | 30 pc | 4,270 K |
| dor | Tessa“tile, she who is” | 4.02 | B4 I | 952 pc | 21,731 K |
| enn | KS 1545 | 4.19 | K6 I | 396 pc | 4,261 K |
| fael | KS 1552 | 4.21 | A9 V | 22 pc | 7,611 K |
| gyre | KS 1556 | 4.21 | F4 IV | 19 pc | 6,851 K |
| hesp | KS 1614 | 4.28 | A9 I | 353 pc | 7,586 K |
| ir | KS 1668 | 4.35 | K2 III | 203 pc | 4,805 K |
How this was made
Veseskaia was not designed. It was grown outward from Lothefael, 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.