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A Minor Star of the Chained Princess

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A Minor Star of the Chained Princess

Adhab is one of the small stars of Andromeda that carry an Arabic-derived name in the astrological catalogues without any accompanying interpretive tradition. Andromeda in the Greek scheme is the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, chained to the rock in expiation of her mother's boast and rescued by Perseus, and the constellation shares its brightest star, Alpheratz, with the Great Square of Pegasus. Only three or four stars of the figure, Alpheratz, Mirach and Almach, carry any settled traditional meaning; the rest, this one among them, appear in the lists as positions with names attached. Ptolemy assigned planetary natures only to the stars he thought worth describing, and where he is silent later astrology has generally either left the star alone or filled the gap by inference from the constellation as a whole, which is a much weaker basis.

That only Alpheratz, Mirach and Almach among Andromeda's stars carry any real weight in the tradition while the rest, Adhab included, sit unread is not unusual for a Ptolemaic-era constellation; the ancient magnitude catalogues generally recorded only a figure's brightest handful of stars with any care, and later compilers filling out a full constellation list for astrological use had comparatively bare source material to draw on for everything fainter.

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