(2 of 3)
The listings, to be sure, are a bit complicated. The same star sometimes receives a different designation in different catalogues. Currently, one of the most intriguing stars to astronomers is an object in the constellation Aquila (Eagle) that seems simultaneously to be hurtling toward and away from us. It is designated SS 433 because it was the 433rd object listed in a catalogue published a few years ago by Case Western Reserve Astronomers C. Bruce Stephenson and Nicholas Sanduleak. But it is also listed in a standard inventory of variable stars (whose light brightens and dims) as V1343 Aquilae. If the myriad catalogues are something of a hodgepodge, a semblance of order is maintained by the International Astronomical Union, the organization of the world's professional astronomers. The I.A.U. not only supervises star designations but also controls the labeling of planets, moons and other heavenly bodies that traditionally bear proper names suggested by their discoverers. Thanks to an extraordinarily successful decade of solar-system exploration, the I.A.U.'s naming committees have had to work overtime. They have approved names for hundreds of topographical features—craters, mountains, plains—on 18 planets and moons, as well as for three newly discovered moons of Jupiter (Adrastea, Thebe and Metis, all intimately connected with the king of gods in Greek mythology).
Astronomy is also turning to the classics for discoveries made during the unmanned Voyager spacecrafts' flybys of Saturn's moons. Craters on Mimas, for example, will be named for characters from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur; the recently photographed fissures on Enceladus, for those from the Arabian Nights; features on Tethys, for those from Homer's Odyssey. Yet even so seemingly innocuous a task can bog down in politics. The Soviets like to name newly discovered asteroids after revolutionary heroes. Last summer U.S. and West European astronomers countered by naming one after dissident Soviet Physicist Andrei Sakharov.
Professional astronomers are not above sentiment. Caltech's Charles Kowal, who has found scores of heavenly bodies, from supernovas to moonlets, christened one asteroid Napolitania, after Naples, Italy, his wife's home town. Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics called another Nancy, for his wife. Lowell Observatory's Edward Bowell, in what is admittedly a minority view, sees nothing wrong with someone seeking immortality by hitching his moniker to a star. After all, he says, "nobody owns the stars, do they?"
Even so, astronomers are sure to cold-shoulder the lists of any interloping organization like the International Star Registry. Says Swarthmore's Heintz, chairman of the I.A.U.'s commission for documentation: "There is no chance of the registry's designations being recognized by the world astronomical community." Besides, Marsden points out, many of the stars are so faint that "buyers probably won't even able to find their star." But Registry Founder Downie insists that the astronomers are missing the point. Says he: 'When space travel becomes as common as snowmobiling, it's going to be a lot more fun to go to Elton John and turn left at Sophia Loren than to go up to old 22 mark 109."