Austral fish and Aussie Rowe

Fomalhaut is the 18th brightest star of the night skies – brighter than Deneb, Regulus, Castor. But it is far south, so that we have a restricted window of time to see it.

It’s the Alpha star of constellation Piscis Austrinus, the “southern fish.” It is at declination -30°, right ascension 23h. These numbers are like terse announcements of where and when the star can be seen. For people at northern latitudes, it makes a brief and low appearance above the southern horizon, centered on sidereal time 23, which is in the late night hours in July.

Fomalhaut now rises about midnight. In our picture, you can imagine the curve of the star’s leap from rising to setting, parallel to the celestial equator.

Latin auster meant the south wind, and the southern direction. Derived from it were the adjectives austrinus, australis; the names of two other constellations, Corona Australis and Triangulum Australe; and Terra Australis Incognita, an unknown continent which was supposed to extend all around the south of the global ocean, until navigators found the limits of the actual continent Australia.

And Austria, which is German Österrich, the “eastern realm,” and austere, austerity, words used to describe ascetic saints and, more recently, penny-pinching politicians: is their similarity to the “southern” words just coincidental? No. Latin auster descended from a word that in the ancestral language and in Greek could also mean “east,” or fundamental the “reddish, desert-colored” direction from which dry winds blew.

Things austral bring to my mind another star of the south.

Alan Rowe

He was a major archaeologist, living out his last years in a cramped Manchester room.

I thought of him and his genial voice as Australian, but he spent only part of his career there, and I’m surprised now to learn that he was born (in 1891) at Deptford, near Greenwich. He led excavations at the Egyptian pyramids and at sites in Palestine and Cyrenaica, had been director of the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandra, and lecturer at Manchester University

A group of us raised a weekly Alan fund, and I was the one deputed to collect it and take it around to him in the form of cash, food, bedsheets, or what was needed. I would make him a cup of coffee, listen to his stories about King Farouk, and do some discreet pastel sketching of his long handsome face.

Sometimes he drowsed, but whenever awake his underlip curled downward in a blithe grin; it seemed to me that Aussie cockiness refused to acknowledge squalor and decline.

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