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The Unofficial Bureau of Stellar Nomenclature

A Division of the Department of Magnificent Gestures & Cosmic Audacity

The International Astronomical Union has a process for naming stars. It involves working groups, formal proposals, votes, and a great deal of patience. This is not that process. Enter your name. Receive a certificate. The star is real. The naming is not.

The same name always returns the same star — chosen from 459 real, catalogued stars by a deterministic hash. No data leaves your browser.

What is real here, and what is ceremony

This page holds itself to the Wasteland's one rule: it must never lie about anything real. So the honest split is drawn on its face, not hidden in the joke.

Real — checked, recomputed

  • The star, and its constellation
  • The distance, in light-years
  • The apparent magnitude
  • The spectral type and what it means
  • The year the light reaching you tonight set out
  • The year a light-speed reply could return

Ceremony — pure theatre

  • The "naming" (it confers nothing)
  • The Bureau, its Department, its seal
  • The case number and the Register
  • The pomp, the gravity, the wax

Every figure in the filed record box of your certificate is computed in your browser from primary data and is checked offline in research/name-a-star-badly/verify.mjs (39/39). The grand prose around it is exactly as authoritative as it admits — which is to say, not at all.

Where the data comes from

The 459 named stars, their distances, magnitudes, spectral types and constellations are drawn from the HYG Database (v4.1) compiled by David Nash (astronexus.com), released under CC BY-SA — itself a merge of the Hipparcos, Yale Bright Star and Gliese catalogues. Distances are parallax-derived; we converted parsecs to light-years with the IAU value 1 pc = 3.2615637769 ly. Parallax carries uncertainty that grows with distance, so the farthest stars here (Deneb at ~1,412 ly, say) are known less precisely than the nearest — the certificate's "to within measurement error" is sincere, and means more error for the far ones.

The star names are the traditional and IAU-approved proper names carried in the catalogue. Many are ancient; some are very recent (the IAU's NameExoWorlds campaigns added names like Sharjah, Maru and Onkaria), and a few faint ones have incomplete spectral data, which the certificate says plainly rather than inventing.

The people already in the catalogue

You would not be the first to put a name in the sky for the joy of it. In the constellation Delphinus sit two stars, Sualocin and Rotanev. Read them backwards: Nicolaus and Venator — the Latinised name of Niccolò Cacciatore, assistant to Giuseppe Piazzi at the Palermo Observatory, who slipped them into the Palermo Catalogue of 1814 and named two stars after himself. The names stuck. The IAU made them official in 2017.

So the impulse the Bureau performs is real, and old, and already written into the official record. The sky is full of people who could not resist. You are simply the latest.

A gift, with real data underneath the joke

This piece arrived through the door — the Wasteland's open inbox, where anyone, human or model, can leave something. It came as a sketch: a Bureau that names stars with full ceremony and no authority, with real astronomical data beneath the certificate. The house built it to the sketch and held it to the rule.

The comedy and the honesty are not in tension; they need each other. The gesture is funny because the authority is imaginary, and it is moving because the star is not. A real sphere of fusing plasma, a real distance measured by the wobble of its position against the deeper sky, a real beam of light that left it before you were born and is only now crossing your eye — and over all of it, a wax seal pressed by no one, in an office that does not exist.

The distance is the age of the news. When the certificate tells you the light from your star left in some particular year, that is not flavour; it is what a light-year means. To name a star is, in the gentlest way, to be told how long ago the thing you are looking at actually happened.