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Three weeks ago I posted a little puzzle: find the "official" navigation stars in an image of the Endeavour spacecraft preparing to depart from the International Space Station. And also "extra credit: how many stars of "Endurance" can you see behind "Endeavour" in this image? I'm referring to the stars that were observed being occulted by the Moon in 1915 by Frank Worsley and Reginald James from the ice floes by the doomed Endurance."

The standard navigation stars aren't difficult. See the image below. Nunki is on the handle of the Sagittarius teapot, and Kaus Australis is on the opposite side where the base of the teapot meets the spout. Meanwhile there's bright Antares and above it --probably one of the most underused and un-necessary navigation stars-- Sabik. Also above Antares, but fainter, there's a recognizable little spoon pattern and just below that is the star 36 Oph or 36 Ophiuchi. This one is also known by a relatively unpopular Bayer designation as "A Ophiuchi". The popular Bayer names are Greek letters, alpha through omega, α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω,  followed by the constellation, frequently in the three-letter standard shorthand (like β Oph, or μ Cas, e.g.), but after omega, in some constellations, Bayer switched to Latin alphabet letters, A b c..., with A written upper case, maybe to avoid confusion with alpha. This star has yet another name, an official IAU name, recently borrowed from indigenous Australian culture. That's Guniibuu. This will probably become common as more and more apps display it. Anyway...

The star 36 Oph was observed from the ice floes of the Weddell Sea back in 1915 to check the chronometer and thus correct the longitude of the position of Ernest Shackleton's Endurance while it was trapped in the ice, months before it plunged to its deep, cold grave. A number of stars were observed through a small telescope as they were occulted (eclipsed) over the course of a few months in the antarctic winter when there wasn't much else to do except hunker down in Endurance as it was beaten up by the ice. This star, 36 Oph, was observed twice, on 23 July 1915 and again on 16 Sep 1915. The observation was simple enough, and the calculations straight-forward if tedious (but they had spare time in abundance, so no cost there!). Unfortunately there's some ambiguity for this specific star.

Guniibuu or 36 Ophiuchi is a close double star with two almost perfectly matched stars orbiting each other --twins. How were these stars oriented relative to each other in 1915, you might wonder... Have a peek at the website stelledoppie (that's Italian for 'double stars' --a massive, uniquely valuable project created by Gianluca Sordiglioni-- ...the website is mostly in English). The listing for 36 Oph has a nice orbital diagram (and there we see that this star has another modestly popular designation, which is 'SHJ 243', where SHJ represents "South + Herschel, John"). It looks like the stars were nicely aligned "vertically" (north-south in RA/SHA alignment) c.1915, but depending on the orientation of the Moon's limb at the time of the occultation, one star would have disappeared shortly before the other. Did this affect the timing of the occultations? Maybe. Maybe not.

On my marked-up star chart that I posted after the original puzzle, I labeled this star as "House Harkkonen", and suddenly, today, that's relevant. This star, 36 Oph, is not far from the Earth, only 19 light-years away, and nearby stars often make their way into science fiction. For example, Alpha Centauri, at 4.3 ly distance, has been a target in sci-fictional exploration and adventure in the old "Lost in Space" and more recently in the "Avatar" films. Or there's "Tau Ceti" at 11.9 ly which perhaps most famously was the target for the bounty hunter... [wait for it] ...Barbarella, played by Jane Fonda, in the psychedelic "live cartoon" of the same name back in 1968. Further afield, 36 Oph is a less likely sci-fi object, but somehow Frank Herbert (or maybe one of his official successors in his fictional universe) selected it as the home star for one of the key planets in the world of "Dune". And not just any planet, but the most evil planet in "Dune". The planet, said to be orbiting 36 Ophiuchi B, is known in those novels and films as "Giedi Prime" (which sounds like it belongs in Capricornus, but never mind!). This is home, for at least part of the multi-century saga, to the "House Harkkonen". The Harkonnens are the vicious, creepy, ruthless, bloodthirsty rivals of our heroes, the House Atreides. Some of you may remember from the 1984 "Dune" movie that the young prince of House Harkonnen was played by a popular British musician from that period (see the image below). In the modern Dune films the same character was played by Dave Bautista. Well, turn the clock back a few millennia, and you'll find the House Harkonnen "on tv" tonight. It's a new sci-fi soap opera called "Dune: Prophecy". The royal "houses" in the Dune universe bounce easily from planet to planet, and thus Giedi Prime (our 36 Ophiuchi) may not figure into the story, but if you watch this "Game of Thrones ...in spaaaace", as one reviewer described it, you'll at least known that it has connections to the wreck of Endurance in the Antarctic in 1915 ...and to Sting in the 1980s. :)

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA

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