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Reading the Position: Capricorn 23 Degrees 38 Minutes, and a Duplicate Entry

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Reading the Position: Capricorn 23 Degrees 38 Minutes, and a Duplicate Entry

The atlas records this star at Capricorn 23 degrees 38 minutes, projected from Aquila.

The entry Deneb Okab carries the same sign, the same degree and the same minute, in the same constellation. Two separate stars agreeing to the arcminute does not happen; these are one star recorded twice under two spellings of the same Arabic name, deneb al-uqab, the tail of the eagle. The atlas holds both because the modern fixed-star lists hold both, and those lists were built by compilers copying earlier compilers and treating a variant transliteration as a new object.

A third entry in the same constellation, Dheneb, carries a third form of the same root and is not a duplicate: it is recorded at Capricorn 19 degrees 48 minutes, three degrees and fifty minutes away, so it is a different star that happens to share a name. Distinguishing the two cases is the point. A shared name proves nothing; a shared position to the arcminute proves a great deal.

On precession, a fixed star gains about fifty seconds of arc a year, a degree in roughly seventy two years. Taking the figure for epoch 2000, this star entered Capricorn early in the fourth century and will cross into Aquarius in about four hundred and fifty years, sooner than most of the entries in this group.

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