From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (urth) 5HC star hunt
Date: Mon, 18 May 98 20:33:00 GMT

Hey, Cerberus-heads!

Let's find the star of Saint Anne/Saint Croix!  Let's work out the
other planets in the system!

The clues I have at hand are few:

1.  We are told that Marsh aged "20 years Newtonian" in his trip,
suggesting that the star is within 20 lightyears of Sol (since the
ship would seem to be travelling sublight).

2.  We are told that Sol is located in the tail of "the Fighting
Lizard" constellation.  This could be made up, or it could be either
constellation Lacerta (located at 22h 20m 35N) or Chameleon (11h 30m
80S).  For Sol to appear within these constellations, the viewpoint
star would (I think) have to be located around either (10h 40m 35S)
or (23h 30m 80N).

3.  We are told that one local year on St. Anne is 402 days . . . do
we have any hint as to the length of the local day?  (This can be
used to calculate orbital distance for St. A/St. C around their star,
which in turn can give a hint as to stellar class, etc.)

4.  The sunlight/star is "pink," which might mean stellar class K or M.

There are a few other constellations mentioned which might or might not
be translatable into ones we know.

 CONSTELLATIONS
 Fever
 Shadow Child (with "two bright star eyes"--hel-lo, Hethor!)
 The Snow Woman (planet?)
 Five Flowers
 Seeing Seed
 Swift (planet, probably inner, ala Mercury)
 Valley of Milk ("Milky Way"?)
 Dead Man (planet)
 Lost Wishes
 Burning Hair Woman
 Bearded Five Legs
 Rose of Amethyst, aka Thousand Feelers and the Fish
 Eye of Cold (star)

Some easy guesses.  Well yes, there is a Wolf series of stars,
several within 20 light years of Sol:

Wolf 359 -- (10h 54m 7N), 7.6 light years (class M8e)
Wolf 28  -- (0h 46m 5N), 13.9 light years (class DG)
Wolf 424 -- (12h 31m 9N), 14.2 light years (double star, both M6e)
Wolf 294 -- (6h 52m 33N), 19.4 light years (class M4)
Wolf 630 -- (16h 53m 8S), 20.3 light years (four star system, M4, M5)

And no, there doesn't seem to be anything around those "opposite"
areas for Chameleon or Lacerta.

So!  Any other clues in the text--Robert Borski (and other 5HC-fans)?

Your partner in over-reading,

=mantis=

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/