Keff al Salsalat

Keff al Salsalat is an Arabic descriptive name, from kaff, the palm or flat of the hand, and silsila, a chain: the hand at the chain, marking the point in the figure of Andromeda where the bound princess and the chain that holds her meet. The Greek figure is of Andromeda chained to the rock as an offering to the sea monster, and the Arabic star-names of this constellation divide between two quite different readings of the same stars, since indigenous Arabian tradition saw a large fish or other figures in this region before the Ptolemaic constellations were translated into Arabic. Names built on al-silsila belong to the translated Greek figure. The star lies in the early degrees of the tropical sign of Taurus by the ecliptic longitudes used in the fixed-star tradition, and no Ptolemaic planetary nature is recorded for it.

The double naming of this stretch of sky, an indigenous Arabian fish or sea-creature figure overlaid by the Ptolemaic princess and her chain once the Greek constellations were translated into Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries, is not unique to Andromeda; the whole zodiacal band and its borders carried older Bedouin star-lore before the translators got to it, and traces of both layers survive tangled together in the names that reached the Latin West. Such names, precise and largely without interpretive tradition, are the staple of Richard Hinckley Allen's 1899 Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, the standard English reference behind much of this catalogue's nomenclature.

The atlas records this star at Aries 22 degrees 2 minutes. That number is the star projected onto the ecliptic, and it is worth being clear about what the projection does, because Andromeda does not touch the ecliptic. It lies well to the north of it, and no star of the chained princess is ever seen among the constellations of the zodiac. A star said to be in Aries is in the part of Aries that its longitude falls into when a line is dropped from it to the ecliptic, and nowhere near the Ram.

The figure is also not permanent. Precession advances a fixed star's tropical longitude by about fifty seconds of arc a year, one degree in roughly seventy two years, so the position belongs to an epoch. Taking the recorded value for epoch 2000 and applying a uniform rate, this star crossed from Pisces into Aries around the fifth century of the common era, and will cross into Taurus in something like another five hundred and seventy years.

It is the only one of the twelve minor stars in this atlas placed in Aries; the rest fall in Taurus, Capricorn and Aquarius.

Anyone comparing this longitude with a figure from an older printed list should expect a difference, and should expect it to be about a degree for every seventy years between the two epochs rather than a copying error.