Let’s Get Sidereal
by Kim Pederson…….
More often than not my word for the day email from Merriam-Webster chooses mundane terms known even to me (or maybe I should say “ultramundane” for those instances). And sometimes not. One of the latter was “sidereal.” When I saw it, I wondered what the heck “side real” had to do with the sinoprice of tea. That was my first mistake. It’s not pronounced “side real”; it’s pronounced “sigh DEER ree al” and it means “of or relating to the stars or constellations.”
Upon learning the word, I wanted to know why someone didn’t come up with something more obvious like “constellationary” or “staratory” instead of this one. Because of the Romans naturally. Sidereal is from the Latin sider from sidus for star or constellation. It might also be related to the Old Norse svitha, to burn. I like that one (big surprise) because its Norse and because it means I can change the Elvis song “Burning Love” to “Siderealing Love” or “Svitharing Love” just to amuse myself. (It doesn’t take much as you might have guessed.)
Speaking of constellations, those mythical and magical sidereal segments of the celestial sphere, how many of you knew there are 88 official ones? (Puppis or Reticulum, anyone? Anyone?) Of these I can recognize Orion and no others. (The Big Dipper, sadly, is an asterism and not a constellation.) Another thing I didn’t know about constellations but probably should have figured out is that their individual stars are, as Fleetwood Mac instructed, going their own way. This means that after tens or hundreds of thousands of years, they will lose their “shape” and become unrecognizable.
And that means we will have to make up new ones. I’m jumping on the bandwagon early here. Rather than look for a pattern of stars that resembles something, I am taking the opposite approach: picking two closely related and very familiar shapes for my constellation and then looking for a clump of stars I can use to create said constellanthropomorphizication. If you are wondering, my constellation will be called Ren & Stimpy after the sick (in all normal and slang senses of the word) cartoon series featuring an unstable chihuahua and a dimwitted cat. I will start searching the heavens for them tonight. Of course, you know what I will say (or sing) when I find them up there: Happy happy joy joy! Feel free to join in.
* In case you were wondering what Orion really looks like. By Johannes Hevelius (28 January 1611 – 28 January 1687) (US-PD).
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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.