Mars with Mercury, and an Ill-Omened Reputation

The tradition gives Scheat the nature of Mars with Mercury, and it became one of the more ill-omened stars of the catalogue: Robson reads it for extreme misfortune, and, in the lurid manner of the older sources, associates it particularly with danger of drowning and death by water. This heavy freight of doom is late compilation rather than anything observed, and belongs with the general tendency of the tradition to pile specific disasters onto the redder and more menacing-looking stars. The reliable statement is the simpler one: Scheat is a cool, luminous, variable red giant marking a corner of the Great Square, remarkable in fact as a star nearing the end of its life.

The drowning association piled onto Scheat is sometimes connected, without firm documentation, to a nineteenth-century story that a ship named for the star was lost at sea, an anecdote that if true would itself be a striking case of the tradition's imagery generating a story rather than recording one, though the tale's own origins are murky enough that it should be treated as folklore about the star rather than as an event that can be confirmed. Scheat's designation as Beta Pegasi despite occasionally outshining the constellation's Alpha star, Markab, when near visual maximum is one of several cases in this catalogue where a variable star's fluctuating brightness sits uneasily with a fixed, unchanging Bayer letter.