A Star of Venus

The tradition assigns Mirach the nature of Venus, reading it for personal charm, love of company, marriage and success won through others, a delineation that comes principally from Robson and the nineteenth-century sources he compiled rather than from any second-century text. The name has nothing to do with any of this: Mirach descends through Arabic and a scribal path from a word for a girdle or loincloth, marking the star's place on the figure. Its astrological reputation is entirely of the benefic, Venusian kind, with none of the martial or Saturnine menace attached to the red stars nearer the ecliptic.

Mirach anchors one of the more useful practical asterisms for locating deep-sky objects: a line drawn from Mirach through the fainter Mu Andromedae, extended the same distance again, lands almost exactly on the Andromeda Galaxy, a star-hopping method amateur observers have used for generations before digital go-to telescopes made the search trivial. The girdle sense of the name is shared with Zosma in Leo and Mirzam near Sirius, part of a small family of Arabic star-names built on the same word for a belt or waistband, applied to quite different constellations by different compilers.