Smokend Info Blog

Planetarium directors, astronomers and scientists typically agree that star naming is scientifically impertinent. Space.com alleges that your money can be better spent on a picture astronomy book than on a novelty gift, nonetheless planetariums and other science non-profits have started up star naming services because they are so popular with the public. Why do star naming services have such appeal? There are a couple of reasons:

1. The least self-evident reason is that for each person who might read an article about astronomy in a book or magazine, a thousand have seen their horoscope for the day. Surprising but true, most laymen confuse astrologers with astronomers and make no differentiation. Why? Because astrology refers to a human’s physiological relationship with the stars. Why is that so significant? The belief that what goes on in the stars determines a human’s individual lifetime has been a component of our civilization from the start. The scientist Johannes Kepler, who verified without a doubt that the planets orbit around the Sun instead of the Earth, gained his living casting horoscopes for the monarchs of Europe. During the time that astronomy was supplanting astrology, it was still considered a highly prestigious profession. It wasn’t until Sir Isaac Newton started to account the way in which the planets, moons, and stars influence one another in outer space through his laws of gravitational force did society start to look on the stars as anything else beside harbingers of their individual fate.

2. The notion that the stars deliver a personal connection with people began with the Greek concept that the entire universe rotates around the Earth. If the stars goes around about the Earth, then what occurs in that universe, so one might suppose, surely must touch on me. This is why star divination to this day has such a prodigious influence on us, specially when it ventures to prognosticate the future.

Name a star and name a galaxy with Windowpane Observatory.

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