Your name in the sky for 50 dollars!

Was watching a lousy film where the boy offered the girl a certificate stating that he 'officially' named a star after her (I know, awfully corny. Later the girl died from a serious disease, and that's when the film started to be interesting :)

So I googled the thing about 'naming stars'. And it turns out, there is a bunch of companies that do that! The biggest is probably The International Star Registry, which is based in Illinois and claims to have named more than a million stars so far and counts Winona Ryder and Nicole Kidman among their customers.

And for prices ranging from 50 to 130 dollars, that's a lot of money.

I wondered who gave those guys the right to name stars? And so, back to the most impressive tool of our era, google, it turns out that..
No one gave them the right. They just do it anyway.

According to this article in Wired Magazine, they just send their customers a nice certificate of paper stating that they named the star after your fifty dollars -- sorry, I meant, your loved ones; and they also send you a map of th stars with 'yours' circled in Red.

Nyark nyark nyark nyark. I love the idea. A fascinating business model, where you sell really nothing for a decent amount of money.

Arabs will remember the old film 'maganin fi na3im' (the crazy ones are in heaven) by Ismail Yassine (must have been in the early 60s, no?) where Ismail works for Tawfiq El Deqen who is the owner of the Outer Space Company (sharekat al fada2 Al 3alami!) which sold property in Outer Space. Well, that's the same thing, but those guys have better websites :)

Just for those still wondering, the only organsation allowed to name a star is the International Astronomical Union , and those guys are very happy about what the ISR and its sister scammers are doing.

Those are apparently fine with it. They say that they sell 'a novelty product' (read: an unofficial product). And they will put the name in a book of theirs, sure, why not? Just than no one will use the name. And they give themselves an aura of respectability by saying that they will register the book with.. (drumroll) "the copyright office of the Library of Congress in the United States of America." As any fool knows, or ought to, you can copyright just about anything if you fill out a form and pay the fee. Copyright merely protects the rights of authors; it doesn't mean the government vouches for what's in the books.

Actually, each and every company can 'sell' the very same star to their customers. (from space.com)
So you'll have an 'Aunt Aziza' which will also be named 'Gertrude Forever' or 'Jazz Rocks' in other companies' records.

And the scientific community, which doesn't find it particularly funny to use Aziza and Gertrude to identify stellar objects, will keep on using their coordinates. So Aunt Aziza is nothing, really, but a string of numbers that refer to the location of the light of a celestial body that died a few million years ago.

Just for info, there is, however, a real possibility to name an asteroid after someone. Bach, Mozart, Frank Zappa and John Lennon are already up there. Who said that those astronomists did not have a sense of humour?

So, there you go, you've been warned. Naming a star after someone binds absolutely no one to use that name for the star.

But according to the film, it'll get you laid, and will probably waste less time than a dinner and a film for two.

Put me on the waiting list for a couple, would ya?