Bayer designation
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 2019-01-20

Bayer designation, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4199 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Astronomical catalogues
#Bayer objects
Bayer designation

A Bayer designation is a stellar designation in which a specific star is identified by a Greek or Latin letter followed by the genitive form of its parent constellation's Latin name. The original list of Bayer designations contained 1,564 stars.

Most of the brighter stars were assigned their first systematic names by the German astronomer Johann Bayer in 1603, in his star atlas "Uranometria". Bayer assigned a lower-case Greek letter (alpha (α), beta (β), gamma (γ), etc.) or a Latin letter (A, b, c, etc.) to each star he catalogued, combined with the Latin name of the star's parent constellation in genitive (possessive) form. (See 88 modern constellations for the genitive forms.) For example, Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus (the Bull) is designated "α Tauri" (pronounced "Alpha Tauri"), which means "Alpha of the Bull".

Bayer used Greek letters for the brighter stars, but the Greek alphabet has only twenty-four letters, while a single constellation may contain fifty or more stars visible to the naked eye. When the Greek letters ran out, Bayer continued with Latin letters: upper case "A", followed by lower case "b" through "z" (omitting "j" and "v"), for a total of another 24 letters. Bayer never went beyond "z", but later astronomers added more designations using both upper and lower case Latin letters, the upper case letters following the lower case ones in general. Examples include "s Carinae" ("s" of the constellation Carina), "d Centauri" ("d" of the constellation Centaurus), "G Scorpii" ("G" of the constellation Scorpius), and "N Velorum" ("N" of the constellation Vela). The last upper-case letter used in this way was "Q".

Bayer catalogued only a few stars too far south to be seen from Germany, but later astronomers (notably Lacaille and Gould) supplemented Bayer's catalog with entries for southern constellati...