Alshain

Alshain is Beta Aquilae, a yellow subgiant of spectral type G8 at about 45 light years, so relatively near that it is a modest star made noticeable only by its position. It lies just south of the brilliant Altair, with the orange giant Tarazed to the north, the three together forming the short line that makes the head of Aquila the eagle recognisable. The name comes, through Arabic, from a Persian word, shahin, the falcon, an older Persian name for the whole group of Altair and its two attendants as a bird, surviving here attached to the fainter of the flanking stars.

At only forty-five light years, Alshain is one of the nearer stars in this entire Andromeda-Aquila cluster of entries, close enough that its distance is known with real precision from direct trigonometric parallax rather than from the less certain spectroscopic methods needed for the more distant giants and supergiants that dominate the list. Being one of the nearer stars named in this whole cluster of Aquila entries, Alshain's true distance was pinned down by direct trigonometric parallax well before that of its more distant neighbours Tarazed and Altair's own galactic surroundings could be characterised in similar detail.

Sources AstronomyAndrew Fraknoi, David Morrison, and Sidney C. Wolff (OpenStax) with Star Names: Their Lore and MeaningRichard Hinckley Allen

Alshain has no strong reading of its own in the tradition; like Tarazed it is taken with the constellation Aquila, sharing the nature Ptolemy gives the eagle's bright stars, Mars with Jupiter, and lending its weight to the eagle's themes of bold enterprise and command. Robson notes for it a keen mind and good fortune shadowed by some hidden trouble, in the manner of the secondary stars, but the detailed reading belongs properly to Altair, and Alshain is delineated by association. Its genuine interest is that it is a fairly near, Sun-like evolved star whose chief claim on attention is the accident of its place beside a far brighter one.

The Persian shahin underlying Alshain's name is the same word that gives the modern Persian term for the saker falcon, a reminder that the whole Altair-Tarazed-Alshain group was read as a bird by more than one tradition independently, Greek eagle and Persian falcon converging on the same three stars without necessarily borrowing from each other. Robson's brief note for Alshain draws its details largely by extension from Tarazed and Altair rather than from any distinct source treating the star on its own account, the ordinary situation for the fainter of a constellation's named flanking stars.