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Bayer’s Uranometria and Bayer letters
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Johann Bayer’s Uranometria*, published in 1603 at Augsburg, Germany, was the first major printed star
atlas and one of the most influential celestial atlases in history. It
contained plates for each of the 48 Ptolemaic constellations, plus one plate
for the 12 new southern constellations that had been invented only a few years earlier by the Dutch explorer Pieter
Dirkszoon Keyser. This was the first appearance of these southern
constellations in an atlas. (The revised catalogue of southern stars compiled
by Keyser’s compatriot Frederick de Houtman was not yet available.)
Bayer’s main source of star positions and magnitudes for the Ptolemaic constellations
was Tycho Brahe’s catalogue of 777 stars published in 1602, augmented by observations of his own. In the
first edition of the Uranometria, a table of stars in each constellation was printed on the reverse of each
plate. It was in these lists that the famous Greek and Roman letters
identifying the brightest stars made their appearance. They are now known as
Bayer letters. Bayer did not allocate letters to any non-Ptolemaic
constellations; that was done by later astronomers.
For example, in Ursa Major the seven stars of the Plough were labelled in order
of right ascension. In Gemini, the three brightest stars were labelled by
declination, from north to south; while in Cygnus the sequence of letters for
the brightest stars follows the overall shape of the constellation. In many
other constellations, and particularly among the fainter stars, there is no
obvious pattern to the distribution of letters at all.
As a result of this somewhat haphazard process there are actually 16
constellations in Bayer’s catalogue in which the star labelled Alpha is not the brightest: Cancer,
Capricornus, Cetus, Corvus, Crater, Delphinus, Draco, Gemini, Hercules, Libra,
Orion, Pegasus, Pisces, Sagitta, Sagittarius, and Triangulum.
In the larger constellations, once the 24 Greek letters from alpha to omega were
exhausted Bayer turned to Roman letters, starting with a capital A followed by
lowercase b, c, d etc. Hercules, with 48 stars, was the only constellation in
which he reached z. (The letters j and v were omitted, but o was included.) Not
all the stars plotted on the charts were listed in Bayer’s catalogue, so numerous faint stars on the charts remained anonymous.
Bayer’s catalogue contains a total of 1,164 Greek and Roman letter designations, but
five of those are duplicates. In three cases the stars concerned were regarded
by Ptolemy as being shared between constellations: Alpha Andromedae (the head
of Andromeda) was regarded by Ptolemy as also being part of Pegasus, so Bayer
gave it the alternative designation Delta Pegasi; Bayer’s Beta Tauri (the tip of the bull’s horn) was the same star as his Gamma Aurigae; while his Nu Boötis was the same as his Psi Herculis. These dual identities were retained by
astronomers for over 300 years, until the revision of the constellations by the
IAU in 1930. Alpha Andromedae, Beta Tauri, and Nu Boötis emerged from this reorganization with their identities intact, but there is
now no Delta Pegasi, Gamma Aurigae, or Psi Herculis. In addition to those
three, the American historian Morton Wagman notes in his exhaustively
researched book on
Lost Stars that Bayer also duplicated Xi Arietis/Psi Ceti and Kappa Ceti/g Tauri by
mistake. Nowadays there is no Psi Ceti or g Tauri.
Confusing the statistics further, some of Bayer’s designations were meant to apply to more than one star. For example, in
Capricornus the Greek letter alpha was applied to both members of a naked-eye
double (Bayer recognized it as double, describing it as “duplex”, whereas Ptolemy had not), while in Orion the letter pi was supposed to apply
to all six stars in the arc forming the lion’s pelt or shield on his left arm. In such cases, later astronomers added
superscripts to Bayer’s letters to distinguish between the individual stars.
Missing stars
As well as assigning Greek and Roman letters to each of the stars in his
catalogue, Bayer also numbered them in the left-hand column. These
identification numbers apparently came from a preliminary working list compiled by Bayer. Over 100 stars on this preliminary list were omitted from the
printed catalogue, which we can tell because the corresponding numbers are
missing. Possibly Bayer dropped these stars from the final version because he
was dissatisfied with the accuracy of their measured positions. This raises an
inconsistency in the catalogue, because the totals for each magnitude class
printed at the right of the page refer to Bayer’s preliminary list and not the redacted version as actually printed. Here are
the identification numbers omitted from the printed catalogue, by
constellation:
Cygnus: 15, 18, 27, 28, 33 (five stars).
Auriga: 23–31 (nine stars).
Serpens: 19–25, 32 (eight stars)
Taurus: 30, 31, 34 (three stars).
Cancer: 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 30, 34 (seven stars).
Leo: 39, 40, 41, 42 (four stars).
Virgo: 32, 36 (two stars).
Scorpius: 11, 16 (two stars).
Capricornus: 27, 28 (two stars).
Aquarius: 29, 30, 31, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40 (eight stars).
Pisces: 29, 30 (two stars).
Cetus: 5, 17, 18, 19 (four stars).
Orion: 9, 11, 14, 17, 20–24, 41 (ten stars).
Eridanus: 8, 18–25, 27–32 (fifteen stars).
Canis Major: 6, 7, 10, 12 (four stars).
Canis Minor: 4 (one star).
Argo: 15, 18, 20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 42, 43, 48, 50–55, 58–61 (twenty one stars).
Hydra: 8, 14, 28 (three stars).
In total: 110 stars.
A separate catalogue, the Explicatio
There were two disadvantages of printing the catalogue on the back of the charts
in Uranometria: it was impossible to read the star list while looking at the chart, and the
lettering showed through the page and spoiled the chart, as can be seen here.
The solution was to print the catalogue separately. Reset in a smaller format,
it appeared under the title Explicatio characterum aeneis Uranometrias in 1624, the year before Bayer’s death, and was republished in 1640, 1654, 1697 and 1723. I have not seen
copies of the 1624 or 1640 editions, but the 1654 edition was marred by numerous typographical errors which were compounded when the type
was reset again for the 1697 edition. These errors remained uncorrected for the final 1723 printing.
As an example, look at the page for Cassiopeia, below. On the left is the original table from the Uranometria, while on the right is the version from the 1697 edition of the Explicatio. In the Explicatio the curly brackets at the right of the star list, which were intended to group
the stars in each magnitude class, were reversed by comparison with those in
the Uranometria. In many cases the new brackets are incomplete or have slipped with respect to
the listed stars. Evidently the printers either failed to recognize the purpose
of these brackets or were simply careless.
Worse are errors in the numbering and lettering of stars. In the examples above, compare the numbers in the left-hand column for the stars lambda, mu and nu. In the original catalogue, these are numbered 14, 8 and 15. In the Explicatio, these numbers have been scrambled to become 4, 58 and 11. There are many more such typographical errors in the numbers columns on other pages.
I have not found any cases where the Greek letters are wrong, but a Greek letter
has vanished both in the listings for Draco and Aquarius, while in Hercules the
letter A is printed in lowercase rather than uppercase and in Orion the letter
n is upside down. This catalogue was in need of a decent proof reader.
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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