FAR from the Madding Crowd is a cornucopia of perceptive meteorology, but Thomas Hardy also provides rich pickings for astronomers. The opening paragraphs of chapter 2, for example, describe the scene as Farmer Oak begins to play his flute one night on Norcombe Hill:
"The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body timed by a common pulse. The North Star was directly in the wind's eye, and since evening the Bear had swung round it outwardly to the east, till he was at a right angle with the meridian.
"A difference in colour of the stars - oftener read of than seen in England - was readily perceptible. The sovereign brilliance of Sirius pierced the eye with a steel glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, and Aldebaran and Betelgeuse shone with a fiery red."
Only a few hundred stars in the sky, usually those more prominent to the naked eye, have names in common use nowadays. Some of the oldest, like Sirius and Arcturus, date from about 500 BC or even earlier. Indeed, the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy catalogued 1,025 stars and 48 constellations in his Almagest about AD 150, and most of the names we know today derive from erratic transliterations of these Arabic names into Latin or Old Spanish.
Many, like Zubenelchemale, Alkalurops, Sadalbari and Adzelfafage, are romantic tongue twisters that evoke all, the mysteries of A Thousand and One Nights, while others are fascinating for their derivation - like Hardy's Betelgeuse which means, we are told, "The armpit of the Central One".
Some names, however, date from more recent times, like Cor Caroli, the leading star in the constellation Canes Venalici: it means "Charles's heart", and probably honours Charles II in whose reign Greenwich Observatory was founded in 1675.
Some time ago, there was a fad for having stars named after loved ones or even for oneself. Curly Watts in Coronation Street, if I remember rightly, had one named after his lady friend Racquel.
More than half a million stars, it seems, were sold in this way by several commercial organisations who would provide clients with certificates and a chart to show their star's position.
The allocated stars, however, are dim objects of the 10th magnitude or fainter, that can be glimpsed only through a powerful telescope and with considerable skill. Moreover, the given names have no official standing.
Such matters nowadays are supervised by the International Astronomical Union, and the designations of the IAU are not for sale.