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Bayer designation. A Bayer designation is a stellar designation in which a specific star is identified by a Greek or Latin letter followed by the genitive form of its parent constellation's Latin name. The original list of Bayer designations contained 1,564 stars. The brighter stars were assigned their first systematic names by the German ...
It introduced a system of designating the brightest stars in each constellation by means of Greek (or less often Latin) letters, and is still widely used. Bayer generally assigned letters by magnitude class: 1st magnitude stars received the earliest letters in the alphabet, followed by 2nd magnitude stars, and so forth (though there are many ...
This table lists those stars or other objects which have Bayer designations, grouped by the constellation part of the designation. Contents:
In this list, a star is identified by a lower-case letter of the Greek alphabet, followed by the Latin name of its parent constellation. The Bayer designation uses the possessive form of a constellation's name, which in almost every case ends in is, i or ae; um if the constellation's name is plural (see genitive case for constellations). In ...
The 58 selected stars for navigation are shown in blue and labelled with their common name, star number, and a Greek letter to indicate their Bayer designation. The additional 115 tabulated stars that can also be used for navigation are shown in red and labelled with a Greek letter to indicate their Bayer designation.
The Bayer designation naming scheme for stars typically uses the first Greek letter, α, for the brightest star in each constellation, and runs through the alphabet before switching to Latin letters. In mathematical finance, the Greeks are the variables denoted by Greek letters used to describe the risk of certain investments.
The German cartographer Johann Bayer used the Greek letters Alpha through Omega, and then A and B, to label the most prominent 26 stars in the constellation. Upsilon was later found to be two stars and labelled Upsilon 1 and Upsilon 2 by John Flamsteed. B Cassiopeiae was in fact the supernova known as Tycho's Supernova. [15]
In the early 19th century few variable stars were known, so it seemed reasonable to use the letters of the Latin script.Because very few constellations contained stars with uppercase Latin-letter Bayer designation greater than Q, the letter R was chosen as a starting point so as to avoid confusion with letter spectral types or the (now rarely used) Latin-letter Bayer designations.