OK, I'll add to this now. Seems like the best thread to do it in, instead of starting a new one.

My daughter's boyfriend bought her a "Shining Star" as a gift. This is a teddy bear with a certificate of sorts attached to it that allows the recipient to go online at the International Star Registry web site to "name" a star. I'm not going to launch into my typical tirade about this scam, but as a journal-published amateur astronomer and celestial cartographer with some real science under my belt, I am obviously not a proponent of this line of "business".

At any rate, my daughter (who is 15) thought it was a cute idea, in spite of my rants against it, and went ahead and "registered" a star with a name of her choice. The "data" came back on the star she received. And I did a little checking.

The coordinates provided for the star she had just "named" are:

17 55 41.93 +52 28 46.54

First off, I look at those coordinates and, right off the bat, I know I'm heading into The Bogus Zone. Sexagesimal celestial coordinates don't normally come in this form. The decimal precision is non-typical. Since Right Ascension is expressed in hours (24 hours through a full sweep of longitude) instead of the way Declination is expressed (in degrees, with 90 degrees from the celestial equator to the each of the poles), the decimal precision necessary to express an exact position at the same resolution is different for RA than in Dec. So generally, the coordinates for a star look like this:

17 55 41.93 +52 28 46.5

The precision in RA needs to be greater than in Dec. We all know that. So that raises a flag for me right there. These guys don't even know enough about what their schilling to get the data in the proper format.

And of course, the next thing I do is run these coordinates through the VizieR service out of the CDS in Strasbourg. I use this service almost daily in my work. It's the best and fastest way to match a set of coordinates to an object in any of over 6000 published astronomical catalogs, including some very deep stellar astrometric catalogs like the Hubble Guide Star Catalog, the USNO catalogs taken from the POSS plates, the 2MASS and UCAC2 catalogs...all highly precise, and reaching deep into the faint magnutudes.

So, anyway...guess what pops out at those coordinates? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Oh, there's this amazingly faint 20th magnitude star about 3.5 arc seconds away, but are they really handing out stars THAT faint? And anything greater than a couple of arcsecs is not an inconsequential error when talking stars. These coordinates are bogus. If they are indeed expressed in equinox J2000.0 reference, they're pointing to open space.

Jeez, what a sham. What a joke. But yet they've managed to sucker over 1 million lemmings into handing over the bucks for it.