Bered

Bered is one of the small entries in the figure of Aquila, the eagle, a constellation of the summer Milky Way whose brightest star, Altair, is one of the three that form the Summer Triangle. The Greek figure is the eagle of Zeus, the bird that carried the thunderbolts and bore Ganymede to Olympus; in Mesopotamian tradition an eagle was already recognised in roughly this region of sky. The name Bered is of Semitic appearance and is one of a number of such forms scattered through the older star lists, sometimes drawn from Hebrew renderings of star positions circulated in Renaissance and early modern astrological literature. No traditional Ptolemaic planetary nature is recorded for it, and it has no interpretive tradition; it is a position in a catalogue.

Names of exactly this kind, precise, minor, and largely without an accompanying interpretive tradition, are the bread and butter of Richard Hinckley Allen's 1899 reference Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, still the standard English source for the fixed-star nomenclature the modern astrological lists inherited; a great many of Allen's Arabic names in turn trace to the seventeenth-century Cairo astronomer Al-Achsasi al-Mouakket, whose star calendar of about 1650 was unknown in the West until Edward Ball Knobel published it in 1895, only four years before Allen's book appeared and folded its contents into general circulation. Bered's Hebrew-looking form likely reflects exactly the Renaissance and early-modern interest in Hebrew star equivalents that produced Bezek elsewhere in this same constellation, two names probably assembled by the same kind of source rather than surviving from any continuous tradition of Hebrew astronomy.

The atlas records this star at Capricorn 16 degrees 3 minutes, projected from Aquila, and the existing article is blunt about the rest: a name of Semitic appearance, no recorded planetary nature, no interpretive tradition. The position is what there is, so the position is worth reading properly.

It is a projection. Aquila lies well north of the ecliptic and none of its stars is ever seen among the constellations of the zodiac, so the sign records where a line from the star meets the ecliptic and not where the star is.

It is also dated. Precession advances a fixed star's tropical longitude by about fifty seconds of arc a year, one degree in roughly seventy two years. Taking the recorded value for epoch 2000 and applying a uniform rate, the star entered Capricorn in the middle of the ninth century and will cross into Aquarius around the turn of the fourth millennium, in about a thousand years.

There is a practical use for that arithmetic beyond curiosity. It gives a way to test a figure copied from an older source: two lists that differ by a degree are consistent with an epoch difference of about seventy years, while two that differ by ten degrees are not describing the same star at all. For an entry that carries nothing but a name and a number, the number is the only thing that can be checked.