Stars · a Light

Many of the brightest stars still carry Arabic names

Look up on a clear night and you are mostly reading Arabic. Altair is al-nasr al-ta'ir, the flying eagle, and Vega is al-nasr al-waqi, the swooping one, two birds on opposite banks of the Milky Way. Aldebaran is al-dabaran, the follower, because it rises behind the Pleiades. Deneb is a tail, Rigel a foot, Fomalhaut the mouth of the fish, Algol the ghoul. Some are worn past recognition. Betelgeuse is usually explained as a misreading of the Arabic for the hand of the Jawza, one letter taken for another by a copyist. The names entered Latin through translations of Ptolemy and through star tables, and when the International Astronomical Union began fixing official spellings in 2016, a large share of the list was Arabic.

Star names in English · from Arabic star lists