Figures / Zireth
Zireth
“high, of the”
zir “high” + -eth “of the”
Zireth (“high, of the”) is a 6-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 21° of the northern sky. Its brightest star is Keleth, magnitude 3.04.
The story
The Smiden hold that Zireth was a tax-collector who sold the same shadow to eleven buyers, and is still counting, and the counting is what you see. North of 48° it never sets, which is taken as evidence that the sentence has not ended. Keleth, the pale coin, is the knot; the remaining 5 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year sing to it badly, on purpose, so it does not grow proud.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 13.82 h
- Declination
- +42.24°
- Angular span
- 21.5°
- Stars in the figure
- 6
- Best season
- spring (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- north of 48° latitude, where it never sets
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Keleth“key, of the” | 3.04 | F2 III | 60 pc | 7,225 K |
| bhor | Talar“foot, one who” | 3.14 | K7 III | 117 pc | 4,088 K |
| ciel | Drinnuncien“throat-now, belonging to” | 4.13 | K4 I | 898 pc | 4,556 K |
| dor | Baelatha“clay-father, she who is” | 4.14 | K7 II | 212 pc | 3,972 K |
| enn | KS 1629 | 4.29 | B9 V | 54 pc | 10,193 K |
| fael | KS 1633 | 4.30 | B7 V | 118 pc | 14,312 K |
How this was made
Zireth was not designed. It was grown outward from Keleth, 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.