The guys that sell “star name registries” to grieving widows and other well-meaning but ignorant folks wishing to honor their deceased relatives are among the lowest of the bottom feeders.

I once unwittingly insulted a very dear friend who had paid these creeps good money to name a star after his deceased wife (a wonderful lady, also a good friend of mine). Before I stopped to think, I explained to him that all astronomical objects with proper names are named by the International Astronomical Union. All other naming agencies are diploma mills, a harmless perversion in itself, but not when they hit the survivors with outrageous fees for a cheap “Certificate of Authenticity”. He couldn’t wait to tell me what he’d done, and I broke his heart instead of keeping my big trap shut.

One of these star-naming companies actually had the nerve to sue an astronomer who blogged about this racket and exposed them for the low-life scumbags they are.

I have another reason to keep these people near the top of my shitlist. Sky Publishing Company used to publish a very fine star atlas, the Becvar Atlas of the Heavens. Although it is scientifically obsolete, dating back to the 40s, the Sky Publishing edition (middle 60s) was an absolutely breathtaking piece of cartography and masterpiece of color printing, and even today is a perfectly acceptable tool for the amateur astronomer as well as a work of art in its own right.

The Becvar Atlas was replaced in the 80s by the Tirion Atlas, a fine piece of work and certainly technically superior, but not the lovely coffee table quality work Becvar and Sky produced. Sky found itself with a warehouse full of the Becvar Atlases, which were picked up for a song by one of these companies. They then proceeded to rip out the pages and send them to their customers to show them a real star chart plot of where their dead relative’s namesake was located in the heavens. I guess it added a touch of scientific versimilitude to the transaction.

The Becvar Atlas is now prized by collectors, but practically unobtainable unless you stumble on one at an estate sale or a university library clearance. What a waste.

AAAAAAARRRGGH.

Below: One page of the Antonin Becvar Atlas of the Heavens, 1950. showing part of the northern Milky Way. The big red oval is the Andromeda Galaxy.

Blue: Milky Way boundaries, Gray: Dark Nebulae, Green: Emission Nebulae, Yellow: Star clusters, Target symbols: Cosmic Radio Sources.