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Constellations are essentially celestial pareidolia. It’s our visual perception finding patterns in the stars. Different people have come up with different constellations. Compare Chinese constellations to Western ones, for instance.But they nevertheless provide convenient visual references, and that is why many star names are in reference to them. Premodern names are often constellation parts like Fomalhaut (“Mouth of the Fish”), Denebola (“Tail of the Lion”), etc. In 1603 Johann Bayer gave stars in constellations Greek letters in order of brightness, with the most bright one getting alpha. In 1712, John Flamsteed’s star catalog was published without his authorization. It listed stars by number from west to east, with the westmost star getting 1.Variable stars are also designated by constellation: R, S, …, Z, RR, RS, …, RZ, SS, ST, …, SZ, …, ZZ, AA, AB, …, AZ, BB, BC, …, BZ, …, QQ, QR, …, QZ (omitting J), then V335, V336, …But most recent catalogs of stars and other extra-Solar-System celestial objects omit constellations. They sometimes have numerical order in the catalog, like the Hipparcos (HIP), Messier (M), and New General Catalogue (NGC) catalogs, and they sometimes have coordinates. Pulsars are usually designated PSR <coordinates>. The Bonner Durchmusterung (BD) uses a combination of north-south zones and west-to-east numbering.Consider Sirius (Sirius - Wikipedia). It is the brightest star in observed luminosity other than the Sun. It has numerous individual names: Dog Star, Aschere, Canicula, Al Shira, Sothis, Alhabor, Mrgavyadha, Lubdhaka, Tenrōsei. It also has numerous catalog names: Alpha Canis Majoris, 9 Canis Majoris, HD 48915, HR 2491, BD -16d1591, GJ 244, LHS 219, ADS 5423, LTT 2638, HIP 32349.Sirius is a binary star, with stars Sirius A and Sirius B in it. The latter one also has some catalog names: EGGR 49, WD 0642-166, GCTP 1577.00

Yep. And the ‘news’ media has admitted on numerous occasions that they INTENTIONALLY conflate the two kinds of firearms, because they have the agenda of pushing for more gun restrictions. Newsweek and Time in the 1970’s did things like showed advertisements for a BB-gun that was powered by a can of freon, and could sure ‘shoot your eye out’, but was by no means a firearm with potential criminal use…..only they covered over the parts of the advertisement that said it was a BB gun, leaving the impression that “a teenage child can legally purchase this full-auto weapon from a mail-order catalog”, which is what their ‘caption’ said.There is almost NO integrity in the ‘news’ media.

This section is spoiler-free.Before I get detailed, I’m going to save you a lot of trouble.Prior to my viewing The Rise of Skywalker, I had tickets to a second showing. Someone else got me the tickets to the showing that I saw tonight, and I had a second set for later this weekend. I figured I’d get to catch things I missed, develop my opinion more.I now no longer have that second set of tickets. I instead bought tickets to Knives Out. Watching this movie the first time prompted me to immediately take money away from Lucasfilm, in what limited capacity I still could, and give it to Rian Johnson.I feel like I’d be happier if I didn’t bother with the first showing. I don’t know what else I can say that would be of real value. If you want to keep reading more detailed thoughts and opinions, go ahead, but if you just want to know if you should give Lucasfilm money to see this … don’t.Here, I’ll even give you the rating: 0.5 stars out of 5. It’s trash. J.J. Abrams put garbage onscreen, lit it on fire, and is telling you to ignore the smell while you look in bedazzled awe at the burning remains of Star Wars.This won’t end the franchise — hardly anything could. And, it isn’t entirely without some fun bits. Finn and Poe are fun; the cast does their best with paper-thin material; there’s some good moments and impressive ideas mixed in with the burning wreckage. But, burning wreckage it still is. The script tries to do far too much story in too little time, such that it doesn’t explore ideas so much as show them as bullet points and toss them on the pyre. Even as empty spectacle it doesn’t work since even the setpieces are rushed, seemingly just as much in the planning stages as in execution. The few good moments can’t save it, and for that, this movie is both cynically wasteful and profoundly disrespectful in posturing as “the end of the Skywalker Saga.” If you watch it, you will need to work to put it out of your head to enjoy the other movies.[SPOILER ALERT: ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE]A Brief SummaryDiscussing the problems with Rise of Skywalker requires context, so I’ll start by summarizing the movie. This will not contain analytical content, but instead it will suffice to state the movie’s events as they unfold.Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker starts from a point of lazy plot contrivance as the film hand-waves away the first act completely, jumping right in on announcing that Palpatine is back and that Kylo has found him. Palpatine returns with nary an explanation, apparently having actually physically survived the destruction of the second Death Star. He brings with him a fleet of black Star Destroyers, called “the Final Order,” that has been buried under the secret Sith planet Exegol this entire time. There are hundreds of these ships, such that they completely blanket the sky, and zombie-Palpatine promises them to Kylo Ren if he can bring him Rey. The Final Order’s Star Destroyers are notably each armed with planet-killing superlasers.Meanwhile, Rey, Finn, and Poe, alarmed by the Emperor’s message signaling an imminent attack on the rest of the galaxy, pile into the Millennium Falcon, searching for a Sith Wayfinder that will lead them to Exegol so that they can prevent the Final Order from launching and defeat the Emperor. What ensues is a nonsequitur series of treasure hunt scenes with Rey and the gang looking for the Wayfinder, Kylo chasing Rey, and the fleet sitting in the lower atmosphere on Exegol, waiting for the heroes to come and destroy them. With each meeting, Kylo reveals more of Rey’s past to her, and as she uncovers the path to Exegol, she also discovers her own origins as Emperor Palpatine’s long-lost granddaughter. Distraught by this revelation and the possibility that she is destined to be the heir to the Sith legacy, Rey nearly quits in order to keep from playing into the Emperor’s schemes, but goes to face him at the encouragement of her friends and mentors.In the end, Rey leads the Resistance to Exegol, and they prevent the fleet from launching by attacking the one and only antenna that enables them to navigate. The Resistance’s backup arrives to help fight the Final Order, Kylo turns back to the light and confronts Palpatine alongside Rey, and she rejects his invitation to become the heir to the Sith. Kylo dies saving Rey after the final confrontation, and in the epilogue, Rey buries Luke and Leia’s lightsabers on Tatooine and introduces herself to a stranger as Rey Skywalker.Addressing the Rey’s Parents-shaped Elephant in the RoomLet’s acknowledge first that Rey Palpatine happened, and I’m going to add that this isn’t what I think wrecks the movie. Just as The Last Jedi had an obligation to tell its own story independently, this movie has to pick a story to tell for itself. The story J.J. Abrams and Lucasfilm picked was the one where Rey needs to come to grips with being the heir of the archvillain.It is a complete, closed system of establishment, conflict, and resolution within this film. By working the angle of Rey’s fear about her own powers, it connects reasonably to her hesitance in the previous movies, and it evolves that hesitance into a nagging feeling that she doesn’t fit in standing amongst the Skywalker clan. This establishes a theme of standing together with others instead of standing alone, in that Rey spends the entire movie trying to isolate herself due to her impending sense of dread. Finally, it does have the effect of tying Rey in to what came before, and that is somewhat necessary if they want her to close the system of the other two trilogies.In short, this is the part of the movie that is the most cogent. The creators worked very hard to build emotional resonance and closure around this plot point. And, even if it betrays the notion that you don’t need a bloodline at all to be a hero, it doesn’t betray the theme that choices rather than bloodlines make heroes. Rather, making Rey confront this reinforces that theme and spells it out. I’d rather have a world where Rey just gets to be Rey, but if I have to put up with some relation to past characters to close this system, you could do a lot worse than this.However, for all that I can say that this reveal is as well-executed as I think was possible at this juncture, do not mistake me for saying that it is well-executed overall. It isn’t.I get some sense that this was always supposed to be a core storyline in the sequel trilogy, but it feels as if Lucasfilm deliberately held back on it during the two previous films in a misguided attempt to make the momentary reveal surprising rather than making the overall story surprising. It’s an amateurish mistake that leaves Rey’s character in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi noticeably wanting for something, while Rise of Skywalker is left to fill in two movies worth of material itself. It would have been worthwhile to tackle this in the first film as the foundation of the story, because there’s a lot of details that could have enriched Rey’s arc. We could explore how she and Palpatine connect, what parts of his personality arise in her, how she reacts to suddenly having aristocratic roots, what she does with the First Order once they realize she’s the heir to the Empire. This is to say little of how Palpatine himself deals with the concept of family, which could have been fascinating. What role did his son have during the original trilogy? Why did their motivations diverge? Would Rey appreciate being pulled away from her birthright, or would she resent her father for making her live a life of poverty and loneliness?Instead, Rise of Skywalker comes off like Lucasfilm hired the writer for Batman v. Superman to come up with this film in isolation of the other ones, and like everything he knew about Palpatine came from YouTube clips from Return of the Jedi. There is nothing of Palpatine in Rey, and for that matter, there is nothing of Palpatine in Palpatine as far as this movie is concerned. She winds up being the granddaughter of the idea of Palpatine more than actually being his granddaughter. To be frank, Rise of Skywalker doesn’t allow enough time amid all the other noise in this movie to go into any greater depth, and it becomes one of the dozens of wasted ideas thrown on a pyre.Which brings us to the greater part of this critique.Hyperspeed Skipping Through the PlotIn Poe and Finn’s introductory scene, they perform what’s called “hyperspace skipping,” wherein the Millennium Falcon rapidly jumps many times in short succession to escape First Order TIE Fighters in pursuit. It is a spectacle too disorienting to appreciate, as there are about 3–5 distinct locales in this sequence alone, and it only comprises about a minute or two of screen time.This sequence sets the pace of things to come. The movie’s three-paragraph summary looks clean, in that the whole team is at least together on a singular romp instead of splitting up for nearly the entire film, as has been a typical problem for past Star Wars movies. In execution, though, Rise of Skywalker is essentially an entire season of a TV show crushed into a 2.5-hour fever dream by the gravitational collapse of the rest of the series. It’s as if each of the actors has a set of episodes inscribed on flashcards, and they’re being forced at gunpoint to get as many of them over with as possible whenever they’re on-camera. Some of the episodic bullet points fired and forgotten alongside the essential story beats include:Luke was on the trail of the planet Exegol when Kylo betrayed him.Rey trains with Leia to learn how to hear the voices of Jedi past.Poe reconnects with an old flame from back when he was a smuggler.Finn develops Force senses.We connect with a company of ex-First Order stormtroopers.BB-8 makes a best friend.Lando comes back/leaves/comes back again.C-3P0 decodes a map that leads to the map to Palpatine.Rey develops healing powers.Hux acts as a spy for the Resistance to undermine Kylo Ren.The ship that dropped Rey off on Jakku belongs to a Jedi hunter from Palpatine’s employ.General Pryde of the Final Order supersedes the First Order’s leadership.These are all competing for time with the Kylo/Rey relationship, the Palpatine’s Granddaughter plot, the hunt for Exegol, the impending doom of the Final Order, and the Resistance’s last-ditch effort to raise reinforcements. All of this takes place across roughly eight major locations, including Exegol itself.To director J.J. Abrams’s credit, there’s enough kinetic energy, forward momentum, imaginative visuals, and curiosity bound up in this haphazard series of events that when you’re in the theater to see this movie for the first time, the rushed pace is less noticeable. It feels forgivable because there is a sense of anticipation associated with these moments, and my attention remained fixed as I watched to see how they would unfold. Finn and Poe notably have great improvisational banter that makes me wish I were watching their movie.However, once the movie is finished and I look back on it with the benefit of hindsight, there simply isn’t enough run time for any of these beats, major or minor, to develop past their initial statements — not even the one about Rey’s healing powers. You’d think this is the reason Palpatine wants her to come to Exegol, but it isn’t. The heroes land, immediately disembark, rush to the next dot on their map, and only linger for one of Rey’s storylines to take focus for a minute. Side-characters have one or two lines to make their point before being hastily ushered offscreen. Once the minimum viable execution is done, everyone shoves each other back on board the Falcon, and we move as quickly as possible to the next dot on the map.This leads Rise of Skywalker to feel cheap. Locations are rarely fleshed out beyond the superficial backdrop. Cinematography and editing feel sloppy and sometimes disorienting. There are beautiful single shots or frames, but not beautiful scenes. Action scenes, in particular, feel under-served and half-baked, as if the filmmakers viewed them as an inconvenient obligation rather than an essential part of expressing the characters. The ending space battle with the Final Order is probably the worst space battle to date in a Star Wars movie, and what passes as a lightsaber fight in this film is pathetic, given that they had only one movie left to do a genuinely great duel.That might be fine, but exchanges between characters are cut to the absolute minimum, such that they feel like brief cameos rather than actual roles. Even Palpatine only has two scenes, and as I’ve said, his presence is disappointingly empty and unimaginative. In all honesty, it makes the proposal for “Supreme Leader Snoke: The Movie” look compelling by comparison, because what tiny few scenes and what little development Snoke had going for him were far more entertaining than the collected scenes of Palpatine in this movie.An Audit of the Final OrderThe Final Order is used to motivate Rise of Skywalker’s plot, create urgency, and act as Palpatine’s hand. However, like with everything else, it is too careless and inconsiderate in constructing them for the proposal to hold the weight of the film, much less the franchise.Like Snoke before it, the Final Order is a massive contrivance. However, the scope of Snoke’s contrivance is limited only to Snoke himself. His taking advantage of the Emperor’s power vacuum to install himself as a dictator isn’t that much of a strain on the imagination, and his motivations for galactic conquest don’t require any explanation or apologies. He also makes an effective mechanism for filling out Kylo Ren’s motivations, with Kylo’s contribution to the story of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi being thoughtful and worthwhile.Meanwhile, much has been made of Abrams’s sparse worldbuilding in The Force Awakens, with the First Order being largely unexplained and the unaddressed 30-year gap between trilogies often cited as Abrams’s Achilles heel by fans of Star Wars lore. Yet, the First Order had a mechanism for recruitment, an M.O., and a fanatical disposition that characterized them effectively. Through sheer tenacity and force of hate, the Emperor’s military survived to take out their spite on the rest of the Galaxy. They are admittedly two-dimensional, but from a storytelling standpoint, they are functional and logical, with enough detail to feel as if they’re worth exploring.The scope of the Final Order’s contrivances, on the other hand, are massive and irreconcilable, such that they undermine the integrity of storylines both past and present. An enormous military, larger than the combined forces of the Resistance, the First Order, and the Republic, appears out of nowhere as if created by a wish-granting genie, raising many more questions than it answers.How did Palpatine physically survive the destruction of the second Death Star?Where did Palpatine get the resources to create a massive fleet of Star Destroyers?Who is staffing those ships? For that matter, who built them? If the Empire couldn’t maintain security with one Death Star, how could they do it with that many planet-killing Star Destroyers?If Palpatine could miniaturize the Death Star’s laser that efficiently after his Empire had already been destroyed, how come they had such a difficult time building the original Death Star in the first place? Why is a zombie in a sewer so much better at managing R&D than Orson Krennic?Don’t answer that.It stands to reason that this fleet has been under construction for decades. Why was it ever necessary to create something like Starkiller Base when there’s a miniaturized swarm of Starkiller Bases just sitting around waiting to be deployed?Where did they recruit the Sith Troopers? Are they clones? Clones of who? Are they recruits? If so, why would anybody agree to spend the last 30 years living in a sewer with a zombie, without any immediate payoff?What’s even under those helmets!?If Palpatine has had legions of Sith Troopers waiting in the background for this long, and they’re loyal enough to serve a zombie in a sewer without question, why did he ever suffice to use regular Stormtroopers in the first place?By Star Wars standards, the concept of internal consistency is a joke, but this level of laziness is positively damning when other preceding films have tried harder, and that’s brought into view by this film’s posturing as a capstone to all of them.Even if we take the Final Order at face value, we’re still left with irreconcilable plot holes. If Palpatine could do all of this, how come he isn’t on one of those ships? Why is he confined to the sewer of this one planet? Why does he need Kylo Ren to find Rey? Why can’t he command the Final Order and all of his Sith Troopers to sweep the galaxy looking for her? It is characteristic for Palpatine to make others come to him, but he’s had a throne room on a Death Star before — why is he now content to live in a throne-sewer?But maybe most importantly, why are they even here?I want to emphasize this: everyone hears Palpatine’s voice, and both Kylo and Rey lose their shit over that alone. This happens in the opening crawl, before anything appears onscreen, and both of them structure their motivations around him. Palpatine being alive is more than enough to motivate the plot. As such, the Final Order brings little value to the proceedings beyond adding a superficial threat at the Emperor’s behest.Palpatine’s “threat” is to bargain with it, not to use it. For the duration of the movie, the entire fleet sits there and waits for Kylo to deliver the Emperor’s Doordash. We barely even see Sith Troopers fire shots (if at all), and only one of those Star Destroyers leaves Exegol to blow up a garbage-planet (literally a planet made of garbage) from earlier in the film. For the outlandish scope of it, the filmmakers couldn’t think of anything better to do than have the Emperor offer it to Kylo, so that he could harass Rey, so that she’d do the thing she’s already doing: looking for Palpatine!And in the end, what is the spectacle we have onscreen? A bunch of regular old Star Destroyers painted black and mouse-dropped onto the screen, and a bunch of regular old Stormtroopers painted red. I can’t help but sidestep over to Dark Empire, a story I often criticized for its poor self-restraint, but one still so much more inventive about its threat and more willing to invest in meaningful details. There, we have a rationale, with the World Devastators acting as a self-replicating fleet, and the cloned Emperor’s weakness is something just a little more than “use the Force at him really hard.”Knowing that Lucasfilm has this back-catalog to draw from, the lack of attention to detail or imagination on display during this movie is almost impressive. It’s as if Abrams parodied his own thoughtlessness, saying to the audience, “Oh, you thought I was lazy before? I’ll show you how it’s really not-done! I’m not even going to finFuneral for a SkywalkerIt should stand out that, throughout this review of Rise of Skywalker, I have scarcely mentioned any Skywalkers. There isn’t enough time for them in this movie, either.Awkwardly reappropriated footage of Carrie Fisher is used to give Leia a part in the script, but it is unsettlingly utilized as her intonation and reactions, retrofitted as they are for this story, don’t match the characters she’s playing against. Despite the severe limits this footage places on her participation, the filmmakers desperately try to stretch her presence out anyway, perhaps out of a misguided desire to do the actress justice. The concepts behind Leia training Rey, as well as her unexplored past as a Jedi alongside Luke, seem like they could have been interesting, but the implementation of those concepts is as much of a ghost as Carrie herself. It feels less like a follow-through on what they promised her and more like a wistful gravestone to missed opportunities.Luke isn’t handled any better. Mark Hamill reprises his role as the haggard ghost of Luke Skywalker on Ahch-To, speaking the minimum viable number of words to get his point across while he gives Rey a couple of tokens to finish the journey to Exegol and confront the Emperor. Potential existed in the sentiments that Episode IX tries to convey with this scene, but in its mad rush through the editing room, it couldn’t even be bothered to give Luke a spare second or two. He is treated as carelessly as any other side-character in this movie, and the exchange feels uncharacteristically forced. There is lip service to some of the superficial respect that some fans felt was denied to the character in the last movie, but it isn’t a substitute for the actual respect that he’s being denied during this movie’s eulogy of him.Neither Luke nor Leia are characters in this film. They are absent seats that Episode IX tries and fails to frame as being pivotal, their roles absurdly minimal. We have never truly seen Rey or Kylo connect with either of them, so the attempts at pathos come off less as a genuine send-off and more as thoughtless, cynical fanservice. It’s as if Lucasfilm were so busy throwing garbage onto their funeral pyre that it almost forgot the dead bodies it came there to burn.Rise of Mary Sue Palpatine-SkywalkerYou know what sucks? I still haven’t talked about Kylo Ren in this movie. I’m not sure what to say. He and Rey once again had the best exchanges in the film, but saying that is faint praise given that all the best parts are lifted from The Last Jedi. The filmmakers pulled off a hat trick, enabling him to have the deathbed redemption that Star Wars requires of its villains but somehow live through it to become Ben Solo again. It nearly broke a tiresome cycle with a brilliant loophole. If he and Rey joined hands and walked off into the twin sunset together, it wouldn’t be realistic. Still, I’d have bought it in that fairy tale way that Star Wars can manage, and I’d feel less malicious towards this movie and more understanding of the limitations the filmmakers were dealing with. The Skywalkers that they’re trying to give a send-off would have it.Instead, the corpse from his second death is spitefully burned along with the others, all to put Rey Palpatine on a pedestal. At long last, Lucasfilm did it — she’s finally actually a Mary Sue.I want to be clear: it’s not Rey being a Palpatine that’s the problem, and it’s not Rey Skywalker that’s the problem. It’s Rey Palpatine-Skywalker that’s the problem.Rey Nobody becoming Rey Skywalker would have been something I could swallow. Then the character adopting the Skywalker name would represent, on some level, the audience, happening upon the dying King Arthur, listening to his story, and building Camelot anew themselves after learning from the virtues and flaws of the Knights of the Round Table. Even supposing you don’t buy that and aren’t into Star Wars critiquing itself, at the very least, Rey as a new character would be the champion of her own trilogy. A nameless girl earns the name of a family who adopted her in spirit.Instead, Rey Palpatine is a character manufactured from nowhere, retconned into the story as the granddaughter of the main villain at the last minute, and this one movie has the gall to pass her off as the “real” hero. It turns this from being a story that could potentially be yours into a story that’s just for her. Not only the sequel trilogy, but all three trilogies. That’s what nine movies were building towards this whole time, guys! This is what Episodes I through VI were really about! All these other clowns were just warming the bench until J.J. Abrams could contrive Rey into a script. Star Wars, unrecognizable and slapdash the state that it’s in, is hers now.It’s as bad as Galen Marek from The Force Unleashed ever was, maybe worse, because this movie masquerades as definitive material. Not just slightly definitive material, but the definitive material. The ending to the story that George Lucas already ended in 1983, the answer to all the questions — especially the ones you did not ask!Just Get it Over With AlreadyEven that moment might be forgivable if everything else leading up to it weren’t so careless, empty, and dispassionate. Ultimately, philosophical questions about what these creative choices do and don’t mean are immaterial compared with that carelessness, that willingness to let sloppy storytelling slide and unwillingness to give anything in the story better than minimum viable execution at the expense of a few moments. There won’t be another chance to create Episode IX. Kathleen Kennedy said, “well, maybe this is terrible, but we don’t really want to change the production schedule, because this movie isn’t worth it.”You know what? It hasn’t been.