Even if you've had just occasional contact with the world of astronomy and stargazing, you've heard or read of some of the names of the stars. There are even companies out there that will sell you the opportunity to name a star.

If you part with some cash to do that for yourself or someone special in your life, do it for the fun of it. Believe me that if you're naming a star after your old Uncle Fred, no serious astronomer at any university or college will ever research the possibility of a solar system of planets orbiting Fred. They may actually be studying the star you know as Fred, but they certainly won't refer to it as such. The only parties that will call your star Fred are you and the company that sold you the name of the star. Again, buying star names is just for fun and shouldn't be taken seriously.

I suppose if you wanted to you could also sell names for grains of sand on Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. Somebody would buy it!

Every single star you see in the sky already has a name assigned to it, although most of them aren't all that warm and fuzzy. You may have run across star maps with Greek letters next to the stars. This is the universally accepted astronomical star naming system referred to as the Bayer system, where stars are named according to their brightness in their respective constellations. The brightest star in a given constellation is referred to as the Alpha star, the second brightest Beta, the third brightest Gamma, and so on through the rest of the Greek alphabet. After all of the Greek letters are exhausted, regular letters and numbers are used.

Most of the brighter stars are known more commonly by their proper names. Some of these names are a lot of fun, some don't make sense and just about all of them have tricky pronunciations. On top of that, some of these stars have multiple traditional names, depending on your part of the world.

The names of most stars have ancient origins from a hodgepodge of languages. Some of the oldest known names have been passed down from the ancient Greeks. Many of the names are Arabic because in the middle ages the Arabs were highly organized astronomers who cataloged many of the stars and constellations passed down from the ancient Greeks. Many of the Arabic names are still in use today, although a lot of them were translated into Latin and were corrupted along the way, changing their meaning or in some cases stripping them of all meaning.

In our late winter skies right now there are a plethora of great star names, many of them in the bright constellation Orion the Hunter and the gang of constellations that surround the heavenly hunter. Some of the star names translate into body parts of the particular constellation they are members of. For example Rigel (pronounced Rye-jell) is the brightest star in Orion and translates as "the foot" in English. Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetle–juice) is the second brightest star in Orion and is one of my favorite star names, translating roughly to "armpit of the great one."

If you want to find out about more star names, and believe me there are a lot of good ones, check out the Web site http://astro.isi.edu/reference/starintro.html.

You won't find Uncle Fred though!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and author of the new book "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com