Find triangle of birds to navigate stars in the summer sky
As soon as it gets dark these evenings, face southeast and look almost straight up. One bright star will greet you there, far outshining any others. That’s Vega, whose name comes from “the diving vulture’’ in ancient Arabic. It’s the leading light of the little constellation Lyra, a stringed instrument in ancient Greece, a nicer object than a vulture, perhaps, but Vega’s name keeps the mythological carrion eater alive and staring down at us watchfully.
That’s bird number one.
Lower left of Vega is a star not quite as bright, Deneb. It’s the prime luminary of
That’s bird number two.
Lower to the right is a star brighter than Deneb, but less brilliant than Vega. This is
That’s bird number three.
Swans are harmless enough birds, at least when aloft (you don’t want to mess with a swan on the ground). But the eagle is a killer, the largest flying predator in the world, and the vulture is a scavenger that waits patiently to make its living off disasters, always confident that they will come. With the current state of humanity, I’m sometimes uneasy at the symbolism of these two constellations coasting around overhead.
Of course there are happier ways to look at the stellar Rorschach tests. Vega, Deneb, and Altair also form the Summer Triangle, a simple but useful reference pattern for navigating your way all around the summer sky.
Unlike the other bits of stellar lore here (Altair has been the “Eagle Star’’ since at least the dawn of writing in Sumeria some 5,000 years ago), the Summer Triangle is quite new.
It was popularized by the British astronomy broadcaster Patrick Moore about 50 years ago, though there are a few scattered references to it in preceding decades. Today the Summer Triangle is as firmly entrenched in sky-gazing culture as Orion’s Belt and the Big Dipper.
It’s an unusual dolphin, in that it’s less than a quarter the size of a swan, but the ancient myth-makers had to make do with the stars they had. Delphinus comes from ancient Greece. It was supposed to be the dolphin that rescued the poet Arion from pirates and carried him to shore.
Its two brightest stars are Sualocin and Rotanev, names that are much more recent. Someone slipped them into a star catalog, issued in 1814 at Palermo Observatory in Sicily, before it went to the printer.
Read them backward and you get Nicolaus Venator, the name of an observatory assistant there. Yet somehow they have stuck.
Elsewhere in the sky are Regor, Navi, and Dnoces, even more recent. Backward these are Roger, Ivan and Second, commemorating Roger Chaffee, Virgil Ivan Grissom, and Edward White II, the astronauts who died in a fire on the Apollo 1 launchpad in 1967. How long these names will last is anybody’s guess.
Why not name stars yourself? Just go outdoors and do it. Certainly don’t pay money to some radio huckster who implies he can name stars any more officially than you can in your backyard. When my children were born, I went out and picked a naked-eye star to be theirs. Easy.
You can make up your own constellations, too. You’ll need to get away from the city to a darker sky, but once there, what starry Rorschach patterns can you put together? Countless millions of people have done this since prehistory. It was pretty much a fluke which ones caught on and stuck.
Alan M. MacRobert is a senior editor of Sky & Telescope magazine in Cambridge (SkyandTelescope.com). His Star Watch column appears the first Saturday of every month. 
