Nunki

Nunki is Sigma Sagittarii, a hot blue main-sequence star of spectral type B2.5 at about 230 light years, the second-brightest star of Sagittarius. It stands in the handle of the Teapot, the familiar asterism that forms the body of the archer, in the small group sometimes called the Teaspoon. Its name is remarkable: Nunki is one of the very few star-names to come down from ancient Babylonian and Assyrian astronomy, revived in modern times from a cuneiform designation, a rare survival of the star-lore of Mesopotamia into the names in use today.

The cuneiform designation behind Nunki's revival is generally connected with a Babylonian name meaning something like the star of the proclamation of the sea, or of Ea, god of the sweet waters, part of the wider Mesopotamian tradition that gave the constellation of the Goat-Fish, Capricornus, to the same watery god; the identification rests on nineteenth and twentieth-century Assyriological reconstruction of star lists rather than on a continuous unbroken naming tradition. Sagittarius's Teapot asterism, though a purely modern popular pattern rather than any historical constellation figure, has become one of the most widely used naked-eye landmarks for locating the galactic centre, which lies just beyond the spout.

The tradition gives Nunki the nature of Mercury with Jupiter, and Robson reads it for truthfulness, a sober and religious mind and success in study and in the grave professions, a comparatively favourable delineation combining the Mercurial intellect with the Jovian sense of order and faith. The reading, like the others, belongs to the modern compiling tradition rather than to a specific ancient assignment. The star's deeper interest is historical: through its Babylonian name it is a living thread back to the oldest systematic astronomy of the ancient Near East, the civilisation that first divided the zodiac and named the paths of the sky.

Nunki's B2.5 spectral class makes it one of the hotter stars in this entire set of tables, radiating strongly in the ultraviolet as well as visible light, and its position in the Teapot asterism means it is, for observers in the northern mid-latitudes, always a relatively low, summer-only object, never rising very high above the southern horizon even at its best. No source earlier than the modern compiling tradition supplies Nunki's specific delineation, so unlike its ancient name, the star's personality reading is a recent layer added long after the Babylonian original was largely forgotten.