orion! monoceros! licera! horologium! cassiopea! such beautiful names writ for as long as man lives, up there, in the stars. oh! to in some small way continue on out there in the vast mysterious heart of space! what a fate. if only puny scuttling creatures such as myself could join those great shining ranks, to span the ages, by lending my name to a star… oh wait, that’s right, i already have.
don’t believe me? well i have proof.
see? an embossed gold seal and everything. can’t argue with that. the text reads: let it be known to all that the star located at ra 203.4575125 and declination -59.70278611 is named in honor of jaime morrison. “in honor” no less.
yeah, in may of 2003 my girlfriend (and my cats) made the sweet gesture of having a star named after me. yes, i know i know, it’s not real. seti is not going to be searching a system, find a signal from an alien race, then announce to the world all breathlessly “we have received a signal bearing the cures for all known diseases, schematics for faster than light traveling star cruisers, and the recipe for a delicious 7000 proof whiskey from a noble and intelligent race whose planet orbits the glorious jaime morrison sun.” i know that. these star naming offers are bogus. only the international astronomical union can officially name a star. they have this to say about it:
Some commercial enterprises purport to offer such services for a fee. However, such “names” have no formal or official validity whatever: A few bright stars have ancient, traditional Arabic names, but otherwise stars have just catalogue numbers and positions on the sky. Similar rules on “buying” names apply to star clusters and galaxies as well. For bodies in the Solar System, special procedures for assigning official names apply, but in no case are commercial transactions involved.
all understood… but still there is something romantic and interesting about the idea, symbolic or imaginary though it may be. and why not?
to be honest until last night i’d forgotten about the super massive nuclear reactor in deep space which bares my name. such is the lunacy of the human mind. when i remembered i thought “hmmmm, perhaps this is the way it is for our intelligent designer (better known as god), perhaps his girlfriend (and cats) presented him with a nice shiny universe for being a swell sort of fella and after a month or two he just plain forgot?” well, i refuse to be lumped in such thoughtless company so i decided to search out my star.
first i referred to the lushly illustrated and strikingly detailed star map the good folks at star namer sent me. i poured over it’s every gorgeous inch soaking in the glory which was my star’s immediate neighborhood. here- take a look for yourself.
did you catch that? i know it’s hard to take it all in. click on it for some more detail. (i’ll wait… what do i care i’ll live on for countless ages, i’ve got a star named after me.)
impressive star chart huh? yeah, well, i have to say that didn’t quite do it for me. as such i thought perhaps if i fired up the ol’ starry night software i have here perhaps i could get some more context, perhaps the reality of this abstraction would become just a smidgeon more clear…
hmmm. guess not. to be honest trying to use this software to locate something was not much fun, mostly because i haven’t the faintest idea how to use it. for another thing my certificate lists my star’s right ascension in decimal form rather than the “hours” format commonly used. i spent some time out there trying to figure out the conversion but let me make an admission right here and now. mathematically, i am, how you say? retarded. seriously. if there is a planet orbiting the star jaime morrison don’t expect any complex messages to emanate from it, unless it arrives in the form of pretty pictures written on alien space paper and folded into a gigantic alien space paper airplane…
anyhow after the fact i noticed that snazzy chart star namers sent had the coordinates written on it in the more user friendly format but by that time starry night decided i’d plumbed space’s depths quite enough and refused to start up again. “grrrrrrrr! impudent software! you dare displease lord morrison? don’‘t you realize i have a star named after me!!!”
in any case i retreated into google to try and find some searchable star maps. i was hell bent on seeing this damned star of mine in a little more detail or at very least in some decodable context to better fuel my romantic (though imaginary) notions. my first effort supplied me with this-
wow! so mysterious. really fires the imagination doesn’t it? i believe that green box is the location of fearsome and magnificent jaime morrison. though i could be mistaken. click it for a closer look if you so please. must say though this is not quite what i had in mind. after fiddling about with various mocking text fields and smirking radio buttons i managed to wring this bit of photographic data from the digital ether-
positively hubble-like is it not? so very majestic… anyhow that about did it for me. yes, that is correct- even great men whose names are writ forever in the heavens must occasionally admit defeat. i can no more find this star using software, math, or the internet, than i could fly to it on the back of a blind manatee. all romantic musings about one’s own imaginary spot in the heavens must as a result stop here.
if there are any kind hearted astronomers out there who happen to have control of some massive research station atop a dormant volcano or something, i’d love a nice glossy 8 x 10 of this region: ra- 13:34 dec- -59d 42. or any further information at all…
for the rest of you why not check out albrecht dürer’s painfully gorgeous woodcut series: the revelation of st john (apocalypse) 1497-98, from where the thumbnail which started this post was culled.