I meant to blog about this ages ago: I wrote an article about the star naming scam for CSICOP. It came out in their magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, back in September, but it’s online for all to read.
Bonus: you can find out my middle name by reading it. Wow!
Extra bonus backstory info: the image they printed with my star in it does not have my star in it. I gave them the image file, and what they printed kinda sorta looks like the field with my star in it, but danged if I can figure out what they did. Cropped, rotated, distorted? You be the judge. Here is the what they printed (left) next to the original image (right; click it to see a bigger version on Flickr):
If you can see their image in this then more power to you. I’m pretty good at pattern recognition (a zillion hours at the eyepiece does that to you) and I can’t do it. It just goes to show you that buying a star gets you nowhere.
February 14th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Philip Cosmo Plait ?
February 14th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Rotate the image that they printed 90 degrees clockwise, then compare it to the right hand side of your image (centered top to bottom, about 3/4 of the way from the center of the image towards the right hand side).
February 14th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Ed, I don’t think so. In their image, the star marking the right angle of the triangle is either the brightest or maybe just as bright as the star at the top of the long side. In my image, the right-angle-star is the faintest in that triangle.
February 14th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
I saw the same thing Ed did, although it’s difficult to be sure it’s the same stars.
February 14th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Ed beat me to it! I looked for the three bright stars shaped like an “L” and found it in a heartbeat precisely where Ed above describes in its rotated form.
February 14th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
OK, I retract my earlier statement. After time sizing the images so that the relative magnitudes appear to be consistent between both images, rotating and other tricks, the “L”-shaped formation doesn’t quite match up. In your photo, the L is closer to a right angle than the published photo. Also, in the published photo are two brighter starts roughly parallel to the longer side of the right angle. In the published photo there is a formation of fairly densly packed material on the hypotenuse side that kind of lines up with the shorter side of the right angle. Finally, the star density in the published photo is nowhere near as dense as your photo.
February 14th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
[...] Let the buyer beware. Thanks to the Bad Astonomer for the pointer. [...]
February 14th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
I’m not sure that it is from the same image at all. The diffraction spikes look different.
February 14th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
It’s bad enough when a private company like ISR does it, but when a public observatory like Sydney Observatory does it, that’s particularly annoying. See
http://www.sydneyobservatory.com.au/star/
February 14th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Fox News has an article on the 10 worst Valentine’s Day gifts. One of them, after the LED studded bra and remote controlled farting teddy bear is Buying A Star! They must have read your article.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,251818,00.html
I was a supervisor at Hyde Memorial Observatory http://www.hydeobservatory.info/ for over 27 years I don’t know which I hated to see walk in more — Creationists or star buyers. Both were a pain. It wasn’t uncommon for folks to expect you to find their star for them. Didn’t matter than there was a line behind each scope to look at the objects for that night. They wanted you to disrupt the line so they could see “their” star. Some would expect you to know how to find Jon Q. Public in the sky. Others would bring a piece of star chart. No coordinates shown as it was too small. Usually the star was drawn in with ball point pen. One guy had the coordinates but didn’t know the epoch. The chart (another small useless one) was the Atlas Coeli 1950.0 atlas but it appeared they used J2000 coordinates to mark the star on that 1950 atlas. It was 10 magnitude and in the middle of the Scutum star cloud. We had no chance of finding it but he was making such a scene I showed him a star field that might have contained his star and said it was the dimmer one in the center of a triangle of brighter stars. Of course there were dozens of such configurations but he was happy — I wasn’t nor were those who were waiting to see the object the scope was supposed to be on.
For memorials we tell them to buy an astronomy book or book on a subject the person was interested in for the public library or school library if is for a child. We have a list and tell them to check with the Librarian for which books would fit their collections. The library then puts in a frontispiece that says it was donated in memory of the person. Does a lot more good than wasting the money on a piece of paper.
February 14th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
I recently watched an old episode of Northern Exposure in which Holling was extremely motivated to observe a star he had once ‘bought’ and named for an old flame. (He failed.) Though it was one of the main plot lines of the show, I recall thinking about how silly the idea was.
As for matching the pictures. It appears to me that, if you decrease the size of their image by about 40% and rotate it 180 degrees, then it matches up with the middle of the top half of the original. There is such a difference in the contrast and brightness that there is much in the original which cannot be seen in theirs. So it is difficult to confirm an exact match. (I actually did some editing on the original (crop, scale, rotate, adjust brightness and contrast) to try to extract a portion that matches theirs. I must confess that my ‘mapping’ is merely plausible and not compelling.)
February 15th, 2007 at 12:06 am
Phil,
Now we know what your mother called you when she was angry, but PCP?
I wonder if these companies would process a submission to name a star after someone really infamous.
February 15th, 2007 at 12:37 am
I’m stumped, but now I think I’m beginning to see Mary munching a grilled cheese sandwich, or is that a tortilla?
February 15th, 2007 at 1:21 am
Hmm… I took the thumbnail, rotated it 61 degrees and shrunk it down to 63% of the size above, and compared it to the Flickr image… and although I can just about fit the three brightest stars into each other, I can’t make the rest of the background stars fit. Dang.
February 15th, 2007 at 2:04 am
A couple of years ago my SO named a star after me in the Sydney Observatory, drfish. He was well aware that he was only buying an entry in a local catalogue, a lovely printed certificate and a perspex frame.
The thing to note about the Sydney Observatory star-naming is that they make it perfectly clear that the funds are going to assist with the running of public education programs at the Observatory and, frankly, I’d rather my SO spent $250 on public education in astronomy than some useless bit of jewellery or bottle of perfume.
I thought it was the best birthday present ever!
February 15th, 2007 at 2:52 am
This inspires me for a rather interesting competion to ISR. Instead of reselling faint stars, sell the bright ones that way people can find them A roster of about 200 stars would be sufficient. Tell them up front that the name isn’t official. Sell the certificiates a lot cheaper $4.95 sounds about right (give 25% to the planetary society). Have a roster searchable online of the roster. As the slots spill up create a new roster so you’d get I, II, III etc. This way people could see where they fit in. Really you’d be selling sentiment not too much worse ethically than selling a card, with the added plus of an astronomy moment. Allow people to pick their constellation and hemisphere. Give a printout of conjuntions of the star with the moon or planets.
February 15th, 2007 at 2:53 am
I don’t think it’s from the same image. The background stars are too uniform in your image, and I doubt you could extract from it the faint clusters in the image that they printed. Even after messing around with brightness and gamma, and resizing and rotating and flipping, it doesn’t seem likely that they are related.
February 15th, 2007 at 3:31 am
P.C.P. says:
“what they printed kinda sorta looks like the field with my star in it, but danged if I can figure out what they did. Cropped, rotated, distorted?”
I think the word you’re fumbling for is ‘photoshopped’
–
February 15th, 2007 at 4:44 am
Their ads don’t mention the Library of Congress anymore — now they mention the Copyright Office.
Frankly, I cannot control my rage at these bastards. They’re nothing but sociopathic professional criminals who should have been prosecuted years ago under RICO.
February 15th, 2007 at 5:22 am
If you rotate the newspaper image 180 degrees, there’s a triangle of stars with what looks like that dimmer cluster just above center. However, because of the other stars as others have noted, I’m suspicious that they printed a different image of the same piece of sky.
February 15th, 2007 at 7:00 am
Hmm, I’m not too sure about your star, but if you look at sector 7-G you can clearly see that aliens have arranged the stars in the shape of a face.
February 15th, 2007 at 7:18 am
It looks to me at a glance to be the section two thirds down and on the right, rotated CCW 90 Degrees and adjusted for brightness/contrast. But if it seems to be this hard, I’m probably wrong.
About star names, instead of spending money to buy a star that nobody can see, you could always name your children something like Fomalhaut or Spica! That way they are named after a star everyone can see. It’s kinda the same thing, a great conversation piece, and if they don’t hate you for getting made fun of in school too much, they might grow up to love science!
By the way I actually tried this line of reasoning but my wife wasn’t convinced. If my super-nerdy friends can convince their wives to name their poor children after their D&D characters or in Elvish, I thought a star name sounded like a plausible idea, I mean why not? 
February 15th, 2007 at 7:29 am
http://www.joshuamcharles.com/isr_mystar_thumb_perhaps_.jpg
I took the two images into photoshop just to see how they fit up. The three brightest scale down perfectly to fit on top, but the others do not line up. I believe the only remaining solution is that they was a heavily edited picture.
February 15th, 2007 at 7:38 am
I wrote about the starnaming scam on my blog a few days ago in a commentary about Valentine’s Day gifts.
When I was working at the planetarium back in my grad school days I’d hate it, too, when the folks came in wanting to see ‘their’ stars — and they’d show me this crappily photocopied star chart purporting to show how to find the star. One of them looked like the star had been drawn in with a pen!
I remember one woman coming in (and this is the one that started me on my road to denouncing the star registry folks because it was their product) who had gotten a nice certificate showing that a mourner had named a star after her late husband. She was so touched that she wanted to see “Bob’s” (not his real name) star and wanted us to show it to her. The chart was a lousy photocopy with the name International Star Registry on it. The “star” was a blob of ink. The letter accompanying the “chart” seemed to indicate that all astronomers would refer to the star in their research as “Bob’s” star and that her husband would be immortalized in this way.
These scumbags were capitalizing on a woman’s grief, fer cryin’ out loud! And lying, to boot.
Since that time they’ve changed their tune slightly, but they’re still trying to imply that their product is “official” and they’re still not being truthful about it. I can’t countenance that and I warn people away from such products at every chance.
Now, I have seen fundraisers for planetarium facilities that sell stars off the dome — which, if they make it clear that that’s what they’re doing — is fine with me. But, I don’t want anybody to be fooled into thinking they’re name a star officially, and I certainly don’t approve of charging people $50 bucks or whatever it is now for a crappy photocopy and a packet full of promises that turn out to be nothing more than snake oil.
February 15th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Like, who doesn’t already know your middle name? Actually, it’s a nice name.
My sister mentioned that they thought of doing a star naming thing for me. I politely told them I would prefer that they buy me another year’s membership to The Planetary Society or something similar, or as Beche-la-mer said, if the funds were going to the observatory operations, that would be fine.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:00 am
When i first saw the ISR image, i thought it was this exact star field that i had studied about a year ago. It had two similar features in common with my star field. It isn’t, though. Just goes to show you that your mind can play tricks on you when you look at star fields.
I tried rotating pieces of the image, etc. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they aren’t covering the same area. I don’t supposed they told you the angular size of that image they posted. You could take any triangle pattern of three stars from anywhere in the sky, with very few other identifying features, and you could probably “almost” get it to match up with any star field with enough stars in it.
My high school girlfriend bought me a star. She decided to save herself 50 dollars by buying it un-framed. She then decided to nag me incessantly until i took it to a framing shop and got it framed myself. Yeah.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Well, my official guess is rotated 180, in the middle of the second image.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:11 am
I found five groups of stars that came close, but none that matched exactly (who’d have thunk that those many boring hours in astro labs would actually come in handy?:P). I don’t think it is the same picture. They probably didn’t like your picture, so they did an archive search for a pic in the same area of the sky.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:33 am
FYI, it’s no longer CSICOP. They recently changed their name to the Committee for Skeptical Investigation (CSI). CSICOP was such a mouthful to sound out that it was cumbersome for media activities.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Rotate Phil’s image 90 degrees clockwise, then flip it right-to-left (as if looking at it in a mirror), then reduce the brightness to black out most of the dimmer stars and compare the “stars.gif” image to the left edge center of the rotated-and-flipped image (what would be the top center of Phil’s original).
February 15th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Notwithstanding the above, I reckon that the image *may* be there, and all the flippin’ and ‘shoppin’ will be to no avail if what they have done is layered two or more sky photos, and purport that this is ‘your’ piece of the sky.
The problem now is to deduce where and what the extraneous image(s) could be.
Interesting problem. (Hey, have we got an idea for a weekly competition?).
Ivan.
February 15th, 2007 at 11:23 am
A back-of-the napkin calculation says I can see the 10th magnitude Plait star in my largest binos and with my telescope, and maybe with my medium binos if I’m in a really dark place on a night with good seeing.
http://www.go.ednet.ns.ca/~larry/astro/maglimit.html is a handy link.
I’ve never noted that there are any stars or constellations named after cephalopods. The heavens are lacking indeed.
I took my medium binos with me on my recent trip to Death Valley. Man, to be out in a place with actual dark sky for a change was so awesome. When you live in the city it’s hard to remember what the sky really does look like.
February 15th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Actually, here’s a serious question for BA (or anyone who might know). I’ve tried to find this on the net, without success.
There is a formula for finding the limiting magnitude of a telescope. The link in the previous post can do the calculation.
The question is whether or not binoculars have the same limiting magnitude as a telescope with an objective equal to one side of the binoculars, or both combined or somewhere in the middle.
i.e. my medium binos have 3″ objectives. Are they equivalent to a 3″ telescope for limiting magnitude, or a 6″ telescope, or something in between. Presumably either side would be the same as a 3″ scope for limiting magnitude, but since nobody closes one eye to use binos, I can conjecture that it might be different.
Thoughts? wisdom?
February 15th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Squid, the constellation of Cetus is the Sea Monster, and it’s not clear what it really is. Most people depict it as a whale, but I don’t think that’s really canon. So there you go.
Also, the claim I have heard is that with binocs you can see slightly fainter than you can if you had a lens of the same size (depending on the exact characteristics of the binocs). There are companies that make binocular telescopes (JMI for example) where you might be able to find out more.
February 15th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Um…am I the first to note that some amount of effort has gone into trying to find BA’s ISR star photo, when he did just post a link to an effort trying to find Beagle 2 on Mars?
(OK, I admit it…I did spend about a half-hour scouring the pics trying to find a match
.
February 15th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Why hasn’t anyone addressed the most obvious problem with naming
your own star? What if the aliens who already live there think we’re
trying to take them over by claiming their star with a person’s name?!!
And here come the battle fleets!!!!
February 15th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Fraud is fraud.
This practice (selling star cor.) is as bad as that of the nutcase S. B., Uri G., ect. They prey on the weak-minded and gulible of society.
String them up!!! There are laws about fraudulent activitites.
Lunatik
February 16th, 2007 at 6:11 am
“FYI, it’s no longer CSICOP. They recently changed their name to the Committee for Skeptical Investigation (CSI). CSICOP was such a mouthful to sound out that it was cumbersome for media activities.”
Besides, people kept expecting them to turn up in black uniforms, wear gloves indoors, and make inexplicable allusions to “The Prisoner”.
February 19th, 2007 at 5:03 am
Five years later and it still irks me that my sisters thought that a good congratulation-present for our firstborn would be an ISR star. Given that both my wife and I are PhD astronomers we would rather have poked our own eyes out than allow any of our friends to know about it so we hid the certificate away in the back of a cupboard (in case my sisters turned up and wanted to see it). When we moved house last year it “mysteriously” disappeared.
Oh, and ISR spelt my daughter’s middle name wrong.
February 20th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Imagine what it’s like working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Many of these companies use a star catalog developed by SAO 30-plus years ago and slap our name on their website to imply that we approve of their shady practices. I’m told the Smithsonian lawyers elected not to pursue the matter. I wish to heck they would. I’ve also had to field calls and e-mails from grieving family members, although usually they are asking if the company is legit prior to making a purchase. I wonder if the FTC could make them take down the Smithsonian name, too?
November 14th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Hey Phil,
It’s pretty funny that the google ad on this page is for naming a star….
NOT!
( I know you have no control over it, but still!!!!)
From the http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/02/14/star-scammery/
page on 11-14-07
Name a Star from $29.95
Get your official star package not a cheap email printout!
http://www.BuyTheStars.com
May 15th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Alot of people have been asking me about my copy of Antonín Bečvář’s Atlas of the Heavens: Atlas Coeli 1950.0. So I’ll post the info here. I have two copies so one can go to whoever might be interested.
Atlas of the Sky. 16 fold out maps of the sky (approx. 16″ x 22″ each). Also included a large plastic grid overlay. The pages do not show any signs of use. The book has a blue soft cover, silver text, and a metal spiral-type binding. The cover shows wear due to it being oversized compared to text and map pages. Wear might also be due to the overall size of the book.
Author Info:
Antonín Bečvář IPA: [ˈantoɲi:n ˈbɛtʃva:r̝̊] (June 10, 1901 – January 10, 1965) was a Czech astronomer who was active in Slovakia. He was born (and died) in Stará Boleslav. Among his chief achievements is the foundation of the Skalnaté Pleso Observatory and the discovery of the comet C/1947 F2 (Bečvář) (also known by the designations 1947 III and 1947c).
Bečvář is particularly important for his star charts: he led the compilation of the Atlas Coeli Skalnate Pleso (1951), published by Sky Publishing Corporation as the Skalnate Pleso Atlas of the Heavens, which was the state-of-the-art atlas of its kind until Wil Tirion’s “Sky Atlas 2000.0″ in 1981. He also compiled Atlas eclipticalis, 1950.0 (1958), Atlas borealis 1950.0 (1962), and Atlas australis 1950.0 (1964).
see it here on craigslist
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/bks/1173148800.html