Saturday, January 06, 2024

( planet of lalande 21185 by tomislav stimac via / another / yet another )

Imploring in fur-cuffed velvet...

"Speelunker & Argonaut"

candledrip-writ caption
cursing the bright hearses
too Zeno for tontine

attach critic hatchet
eerie lore · lyre feral

Rhexergon (i'll have to recalculate it for 13d, but that won't change the basic picture much). Drew opines. Wikipedia, usually reasonably up to date, lists a second planet as "confirmed" (since 2021) & a third as "suspected". Going there. This page wants to name the second planet "Pofu-pipya". This list remembers Rogue Queen but is heavy on computer games. (Is Zajdel still untranslated?) And then there's this.

On naming far off places: i have always assumed that, if there's a writer interested enough to use a real star in a story & gives a name to a madeup planet around that star, we can go with that name until the day comes that we actually go there. It becomes more complicated when more than one writer has treated a star, but that's not much different from cities that have been known by more than one name. If no one cares enough to devote a work of fiction to it, there's no reason not to use the scientific designation in the meantime.

"I suspect that Keats had this more recent discovery, just 5 years prior, in mind."

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