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Reading the Position: Aquarius 4 Degrees 55 Minutes

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Reading the Position: Aquarius 4 Degrees 55 Minutes

The atlas records this star at Aquarius 4 degrees 55 minutes, projected from Aquila, whose stars lie well north of the ecliptic and are never seen among the constellations of the zodiac.

Precession dates the figure and, for a star this near the head of a sign, dates it usefully. At about fifty seconds of arc a year, one degree in roughly seventy two years, and taking the recorded value for epoch 2000, the star crossed from Capricorn into Aquarius around the middle of the seventeenth century. Fixed-star tables printed before about 1650 place it in Capricorn, and the two placements are the same claim seen from different centuries.

It is one of only two entries in this group of twelve already in Aquarius, the other having crossed the boundary as recently as about 1969. The rest of the Aquila stars here are still in Capricorn and will cross over the coming centuries, in an order set entirely by how far into the sign each one already is.

The name means the second in the head of the eagle, which is an ordinal within a figure rather than a description of the star, and like the other Arabic names in this constellation it is an identifier of position within Aquila rather than of the object itself. Where an entry carries little else, the longitude is the more reliable of the two.

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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.