Constellations

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The constellations used in the Lemizh world are ultimately based on the ancient Greek ones, resulting in overlaps with ours. Some, however, including the ones too far south to be visible from the Mediterranean, were named in the 13^th and 14^th centuries (of our calendar) and are unrelated to our tradition.

The stars in each constellation are numbered, with the brightest stars (brighter than an apparent magnitude of about 4, which corresponds to a Lemizh star brightness of 3) having mostly one-digit numbers, and stars visible to the naked eye under very good conditions (magnitude ~6.3, Lemizh brightness zero) having at most two digits.

Lemizh star brightness is defined as the binary logarithm of a star’s illuminance in Lemizh units (gomUsdmÌt., g^o, see Units of measurement), plus 35. It equals 8.332 − 1.329 × m, where m is the apparent magnitude in our system.

Designations for fainter stars have three or more digits, and those for nonstellar objects include a letter for the object type plus one or more digits, again depending on brightness.

The Milky Way is called RizwsnÌw. ‘street of snow’. The word is a popular test of foreigners’ pronunciation skills.

Sky sphere

The sky sphere depicts the 68 constellations with 6740 naked-eye stars.

The source code for the sky sphere is available on GitHub.

A sketch of pragmatics I