Here in Chicago one of the major talk radio stations has been advertising these star registry companies for years and I noticed that they currently have a Valentine's Day ad running.

I have often wondered how these companies get away with this and then I started thinking that I could theoretically do the same thing they are doing but I will name mountains after people and for a fee print their name in a book with a map showing the location of "their" mountain.

The difference is, I just know I would be sued immediately if I was the one running this sort of scam.

This raises an interesting question - would anyone interested in real astronomy enough to buy a 6 inch aperature, or greater, telescope actually "buy" a star? Should be an interesting plot - y-axis is no. of people buying stars, x-axis is aperature.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

So use lunar or Martian mountains (or craters) instead. Basically the same deal as the star registry. Just make sure your company doesn't sell one of the mountains or craters twice.

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All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.~ Carl Sagan ~

Humanity must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will we fully understand the world in which we live.~Socrates, 500 B.C. ~

Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him. ~Albert Einstein~

Well, I'd definitely sue you if you sold "my" mountain. I don't know if you know the one, Mt. Jens. It's on the border between Nepal and China, about 8,800 meters high.

Well, you might get sued, but I don't think you would lose. You can call mountains anything you want, after all.

As an interesting aside, the issue of "official names" sometimes comes up. For example, the country formerly known as Burma at some time declared that its "official English name" is Myanmar. Which is OK, but in fact it's not possible, because there are actually no "official names" in English. There are names used by the UN, or by the IOC, for example, but those are "official UN names," not "official English names." There is no body with the authority to decide words in English. Dictionaries give a general guide to usage, and have moral power, but they do not have any legal authority.

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As above, so below

Now ya tell me! I wish I would have known this back in English class.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

I've asked that question before and the general consensus seemed to be that Webster just grabbed control. If I spell color "colour" on a spelling test, I'd be marked wrong. But why? I imagine in the 1700 when US was still a British colony that we spelled it colour. At what point did somebody say it will now be spelled "color"? Who gave them the authority to do this? And if this never officially happened, but was just a result of the populace preferring that spelling then what right would a teacher have to mark a student off for that spelling. And why wouldn't "phone" become "fone" now that everyone texting their friends on their cell phones have popularized the spelling?

Although I'm not aware of an authorit for the English language, I've been told that the Spanish language does have an overseeing authority.

Portuguese, Even More So ...

Around 1975, The Government of Portugal, Decreed their Spelling, Would Be Normalized, "ph" Became "f", "ck" Became "c", and Middle "y" Became "ll" ...

Spain, Is Only NOW, Doing The Same Thing; Didn't Mark Twain, Suggest Something Similar, for English?

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

Heh. And no one's so diehard as the French, who are determined to avoid English's pervasive influence.

As far as the superfluous "u," I use it all the time, and I'm an American. However, if I were taking a spelling test (something I've obviously not done in a long time, given I'm 29), I'd spell it the way the teacher wanted me to. That's just sense. Though I did correct my fifth-grade teacher's spelling of "Phoenix," because he was wrong. (He meant Phoenix, Arizona.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Shoot, look how they spell fonics - phonics!

"Phonics - A system of teaching reading and spelling that stresses basic symbol-sound relationships."

It's the blind leading the blind.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

Though even there, it's a tricky issue. Because although one might naively assume that the Portuguese government "owns" Portuguese, in fact it doesn't, the biggest reason being that there is another, larger country where people also speak Portuguese. In that case, if I remember correctly, the Brazilian government also carried out a reform so the two are pretty much harmonized. But in the case of English, the Americans, at the initiative of Webster, I'm pretty sure, carried out some attempted reforms of spelling. Some of them caught on (like centre --> center, and colour --> color), but there were others that never caught on. In France, too, the French Academy does try to keep control over the language, but in that case as well, you have Senegal, Haiti, etc., and the French government has no sovereignty there.

So basically, everything's a mess. But it can't be any other way.

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As above, so below

well here in australia you would actually be marked correct
if you spelt it color- THEN you would be marked wrong

;-)

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No, I'm being ordinarily sarcastic. Don't make me get very sarcastic. You wouldn't like me when I'm very sarcastic. - JayUtah



Surely if you are going to start a conspiracy theory it is best to start with something that might have a grain of truth or reality in it. To start with the preposterous and go downhill from there is just stupid. steve(primus) (Avatar)

"spelt?" You guys are crazy! Australia, I've heard of it. Isn't that an island just off the coast of New Zealand?

Just kidding...

This really gets on my nerves.

Someone asked about a case in NYC. I don't know of anything recent but they were sued by I guess the D.A. in NYC a while back and they lost and had to pay a nice fine.

Interestingly enough, they advertise on WCBS 880 NYC which we can pick up here in metro Philadelphia. I've heard them on other stations as well.

A few years ago, some of us from sci.astro.amateur even caught them advertising on one of the PBS websites and e-mailed them.

After a while they discontinued mentioning I.S.R.

But.....

A few years ago I noticed that they were advertising on This past year I nmy local PBS affiliates website WHYY TV 12 FM 90.9. This past year they had donated a "Star" to WHYY's "Jubilee of Prizes" Mail fundraiser.

I've e-mailed WHYY and even e-mailed local Astronomy Clubs in the Metro Philadelphia area but have not gotten a response.

I'm not sure exactly what else we can do...

Oh, BTW, Sky & Telescope did write an editorial about them and The International Star Registry did threaten them....

To date, I have not heard anything to that extent.

Clearly they are fraudulent and so is that guy that sells fake Real Estate on the Moon and Mars.

One thing that we could do is to sue them as in a class action suit possibly..but I'm not a lawer and I don't have any money.

See my website and join my club....

http://mysite.verizon.net/ed1ward2/

Clear Skies!

Ed

I have been living in the U.S. all my life and i moved to London this year and when we were in the U.S. i didn’t think the differences would matter but they did. I mean they would ( some times ) understand what I am saying but it does make a difference and no offence but I don’t really like their accents :

In U.S. in London
Cell phone mobile
Pants trousers
Trash rubbish
Underwear pants
Apartment flat
Candy sweets
Eraser rubber
Vacuum cleaner hover
Sweatshirt jumper
Bathroom toilets
The most annoying ( I don’t know why this really ticks me off but )
Soccer Football

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The mind is like birds wings when open can soar.

Trunk Boot
Hood Bonnet
Truck Lorrie
Dishwashing Liquid Washing Up liquid
Take out or Carry Out Take away

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

Lets call the whole thing off...

You say tomato and I say tomato,
You say potato and I say potato,
Tomato, Tomato
Potato, Potato
Lets call the whole thing off.

You know, it doesn't work as well in print.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

I've got a tape of Monty Python, et al, called The Dead Parrots Society wherein the person has clearly never heard the song before, sings it with both versions of the words as they themselves pronounce it, and concludes, "I really don't see that they have a problem, here."

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Actually, even into the 19th century, you could "get away with" color, colour, coler, collor, collour etc. There just weren't any real "spelling rules". Educated people would write the same word spelled many different ways IN THE SAME LETTER back then. Lewis and Clark, in their journal entries while traveling the American west, took quite a few "liberties" with spelling, some of them quite inventive, if I remember correctly.

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

What would English be without a little chromological character?

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

Actually it is a small island just to the north of Tasmainia!

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Why is it that in a traffic jam the other lane always moves faster?

One last point on the subject. I wonder if
people have the right to see the long list of
allocated star names? The firms have been
stating for years the lists will be
deposited in main libraries.

Yes, for $30 you can buy the book from them. Why would they pass up a chance to make and extra 30 bucks? It's actually a single volume of several books. I guess all the volumes would cost you a couple hundred dollars.

Well if something has been published then it
should be in the national library though I
think a CDrom is better. Not that this makes
the names official. But the hundreds of
thousands who have parted with money over the
years perhaps think some momentum has been
raised to cause some recognition.

Has anyone commented on the header add now advertising above?

It states, "Int'l Star Registry (tm). We have named over 1,000,000 stars. Don't be fooled by imposters"
Ug!!!!

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

Well, you know, we aren't fooled by impostors, which is why we aren't laying out the cash to register stars, right?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The ads must have changed. I don't see Int' Star Registry. Instead I see two other starnaming companies charging only $20 each:

stardeed and starnamer

This isn't an endorsement by BA. Google chooses the ads. That's how Google Ads work. We start talking about it and Google figures to send us ads relavant to our discussion.

I understand. Yet it offers a flare of irony which adds character to the discussion.

[Added: There are three up there, now. Only $19.99 per star at stardeed. Ug.]

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

Yep, still there. Sigh.

As I suggested a couple of years ago (on this forum, I think, but it may have been elsewhere), if it's that important to have a star named after your dad/daughter/goldfish/whatever, why not just persuade them to change their name to Zubenelgenubi?

You can't be Sirius