What do astronomers think about naming stars after people? Astronomers, scientists and planetarium directors are agreed in incriminating star naming as scientifically irrelevant. Space.com pronounces that one’s money can be better spent on a picture astronomy book than on a foolish certificate, notwithstanding planetariums and other real science non-profits have commenced name a star programs because they are so popular with the public. There are at least a couple of reasons why star naming services have such popularity:
- The feeling that stars have a personal connection with people begun with the Greek concept that the entire universe rotates around the Earth. If it’s true that the cosmos rotates around the Earth, then what might happen in that universe, so one might reckon, surely must bear upon me. That is why horoscopes to this day delivers such a wide influence on us, specially when it pretends to prognosticate the future.
- The less apparent is that for each person who might read an article about astronomy in a book or magazine, a thousand have checked on their daily astrology reading. It’s true, most laymen mix up astronomers and astrologers and make no differentiation between the two. Why? Because astrology talks about a human’s personal relationship with the stars. Why is that so influential? The notion that what bumps in the stars impresses a human’s private life has been a component of human culture from the beginning. Johannes Kepler, who established once and for all that the planets revolve around the Sun instead of the Earth, gained his living doing horoscopes for the crowned heads of Europe. So while astronomy was supplanting astrology, it was still viewed a highly respectable profession. It wasn’t until Isaac Newton began to trace the means by which planets, moons, and stars affected one another in space through his laws of gravitational attraction did people start to look at the stars as something else besides precursors of their life’s fate.
There is now a popular name a galaxy service with Windowpane Observatory. Why name a star when you can name a galaxy?