Saw this tonight at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium web site:

Adopt a Star

Arrgh!

At least they're plain about confining it to the planetarium.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I've always wanted to go there. Has anybody here been?

__________________
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

It doesn't say "buy," it says "adopt." Like the "adopt a highway" program. You don't own it, you just volunteer to help out and donate money at the same time.

I do wonder how they're going to do this a bit. Telling the planetarium audience that "Bobby" is the brightest star in the night sky probably won't happen. It could be more along the lines of the bricks in the walk at my old local library. They contained names of donors for the renovation. There could be an "acknowledgment screen" during the presentation or something, and that would be fine, IMO.

__________________
Are you my mummy?

Bobby? This can't be serious.

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Not with that spelling.
I've also decided that the star needs a girls name. I just can't decide which one.

__________________
Are you my mummy?

Bobbie?

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

We had a similar action years ago in Germany to finance the new Munich planetarium; here, you could "buy" (but not name) a star (I bought beta cas) for about $10 (5th mag star) to $1000 (the pole star) depending on brightness and popularity but, like here, it was a fair "sellout", because the certificate said clearly "XY owns the star Z in the planetarium", that is, I "own" or adopted the dot of light.

Any sale claiming to actually transfer ownership of any real celestial object is, of course, bogus.

__________________
"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle". - Tsiolkovsky

Surely, you can't be serious.

__________________
Are you my mummy?

j/k
... and don't call me Shirley!

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Yeah, but you got it the second time around.

__________________
Are you my mummy?

We have a similar adopt a star program at work. There was an old one, where you adopted a "star" on a little tack board, and there's the current one where you adopt a "star" in a computer database. Their (our?) website does say that it's not an official astronomical designation -- you don't own the star -- but it's buried under a ton of text about what a great gift a star makes.

The donations keep our planetarium running -- which keeps me in a job -- but I still don't feel 100% OK with it.

__________________
"The plan does not involve mayonaise."
"... I knew there was a catch."

You can't take the sky from me.

But you can be Sirius......

I'm pretty sure you couldn't be Sirius either... some space based radio company may not appreciate it much

That, plus the fact that if you really WERE Sirius, you'd incinerate the Earth.



EDIT: This got me to thinking ... if the Earth really were inside Sirius (say, in the rather extensive core area, where the temperature is tens of millions of Kelvins), how manu minutes would it take for the entire Earth to vaporize?

__________________
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.