Bangor Daily News Bangor, ME, December 4th, 2006
In a black sky, clear of city lights, your eye can pick out about 6,000 stars. About 300 of the brighter ones have names, such as Polaris, Sirius and Vega. The rest are known to astronomers by numbers.
The names by and large are ancient, given mainly by Arab astronomers, and also Greeks and Romans. The bright star Altair, for example, which you can see on summer evenings, is called after the tag end of the Arabic phrase al-Nasr al-Tair, the flying eagle, which applied to the whole constellation we call Aquila, the Latin for eagle.
The first complete atlas of the sky that systematically ident...
HighBeam Research, Free Preview: 'Stars in the sky; named, numbered, numberless'... Full Membership required for unlimited access. Free 7-day trial.
Subscribers: HighBeam content is only available to HighBeam subscribers. Click the link above for more information.
