Shirly he can. He's just presenting some Altair-nets.

Wow, that was a killo post!

__________________
Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Nope, this was 999.
Kilopost is here
This is now 1001 and counting.

what is the matter with u?what difference does it make wether the star is actually recognised by the official organizations to be yours or not?it's a really nice gesture someone does for you.if you don't want the fancy certificates and stuff that you actually pay for just don't buy it.make your own.but it really doesn't make any difference if it's officially registered or not.not to anyone.

As one of the un-registered, we appreciate your insight into registration status.

In reality, a lot of people believe that these things have some sort of official status. In the UK we have had newspapers (typically tabloids) that have had stars "named" after the tragic victims of horrendous crimes. To my mind, someone is being exploited here.

Yeah. And ften times it's distraught people, or people who are trying to perform some sort of grand gesture who haven't been told that the only thing they've actually purchased is a piece of paper and a little bit of ink in a book no one will ever see. People aren't getting what they think they're paying for, and no one on the receiving end of the money is piping up to fill them in on the details.

It's just like people who go have psychic or astrological readings. You can say "Oh, it's all in good fun," but not everyone is in on it. They don't put up big signs saying "This is fake. Don't heed our advice."

So, what ends up happening is someone names a star after someone for their birthday, or they name a star after their friends just departed daughter, and those people go to a nearby observatory, or even to an amature star party and ask to see their star, or their daughter's star. They're not in on it. The observatory coordinator, or the Joes at the star party have never heard of the "Cynthia" star. What do you tell these people? That they've been scammed? That they bought a piece of cardboard? That something they thought would be recognized the world over, and possibly for thousands of years to come, will never be heard of by anyone outside some dusty room in offices of the "International Star Registry"?

It's not all in good fun when the only people having fun are those who collect the money.

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

You can't take the sky from me.

Way of the World sadly. More we complain the
more we get labled killjoys. I used to like
looking at the horoscopes in the papers years
ago thinking they earned some poor soul a crust
to eat. Now they have premium phone lines and
I know they coin it. Find some lighthearted
ways to counter it all!

Without going too far off topic (I hope) it is clearly all very cynical on the part of the newspapers. So-called "serious newspapers" publish horoscopes to boost sales but clearly do not give them any credence. If they did think that there was something to them, then why do they never give an astrological analysis of, say, the North Korean nuclear issue? Ho-hum...

things get real interesting when we start to talk about pluto and whether it's a planet or not. UT, BA, and Space.com all have some good pages on this. I love to follow the discussion.

Media is corrupting our world, one step at a time...

A lot, in fact I would guess most, of the customers of these various registrys are probably unaware that what they are buying is a novelty certificate with no validity beyond the company that they bought it from. I'm sure that people naming stars after dead loved ones don't believe that they are purchasing a novelty.

Here is the English version.

One must dig a little to get to the diclaimer you've quoted. The principal pages imply ownership as is commonly understood.

The home page is brief in information but does place emphasis on ownership.

[bold mine, of course]

Going to the next likely web page....


There is no hint that "your star" will be the same as someone else's from another registry. The disclaimer is buried in the section we normally call the "fine print".

I personally don't have a problem with their program and this particular one looks rather impressive and can be effective as a charm. [In fact, I once thought we [BAUT] should do one to raise money for astronomy.] Our gripe is that it places unfair emphasis on ownership, no doubt improving sales. It is the disingenous sales approach that is polemic on all the registrys I've seen.

__________________
Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Buy a Parallel Universe

Authority for Universe Ownership allows you to purchase deeds to an entire parallel universe, customized to your specifications!

Wow. I am amazed...

(In a bad way)

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Alex

Dark Comedy Theory. Where c is coffee, s is spew, v is velocity, and w is how much windex used to clean LCD monitor. When I put the sentence through the equation, it unified all 4 forces above. I'm hoping someone here can help me express the precise mathematics into an elegant, simple equation. My next step is to post it in ATM, and then hopefully submit if for refereeing.
-Serenitude

I don't know, that seems to me to be a purely (and obviously) novelty gift. No "registering the LoC" crap, just a nice joke.

No, it isn't. They don't usually learn about it. It's a con.

__________________
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!"

Hmmm. Are you familiar with the term "hyperbole"?

Folks, I deleted the posts from "unregistered." Somehow he/she/it got around the software and posted w/o registering. Let's not encourage this, okay? Thanks.

We now return you to your regular thread, already in progress.

ETA: Sheesh, there were two of them!

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

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.

Good tale, but it sure took the romance out of the teen crush.

Hey, send the boy to me. I'll se