Ashlesha: the coil

Ashlesha is five faint stars in the head of the water snake, the ninth of the moon's 27 stations, and the shape they make is a loop that does not close. The knot is 3 degrees across, six full moons laid side by side. From it the longest constellation in the sky runs east, then bends south, and does not stop until it has crossed close to a third of the sky.

This file stays in the knot, one star at a time, in the order you would draw them. Everything else in the station hangs off that shape.

Start at the west end, with the star that clears the horizon first. It is delta Hydrae, magnitude 4.1. Magnitude runs the wrong way round: the bigger the number, the fainter the star, with about 6 the limit of a good eye in a properly dark place. Most city skies have already taken this one off you. It is white, about 170 light years off, and it turns so fast that it is not round: a fifth wider across the equator than from pole to pole. Old Arabic star lists called it the serpent's tongue.

Go 2 and a half degrees south, five moon-widths, and a fraction east. That is sigma Hydrae, magnitude 4.5, an orange giant around 360 light years off. Its name is Minchir, worn down from the Arabic for the nostril of the serpent, and the International Astronomical Union made that spelling official in 2017.

A tongue and a nostril. Whoever handed out those names had the face already drawn and was filling in its parts.

Carry on east about a degree, near enough level. Here is eta Hydrae at magnitude 4.3, which looks like a smaller copy of the other two and is nothing of the sort. Eta is blue, some seven times the mass of the sun, and it puts out well over 2,000 times the sun's light. It is young: around 30 million years, a fortnight in the life of a star. It looks modest only because it is far off, and the published distances disagree, running from about 470 light years to nearly 600.

Then the climb. Three degrees north and a little east, and you reach the brightest of the five: epsilon Hydrae, magnitude 3.4, about 130 light years away. This is the star the station is pinned to. Indian astronomy calls such a star the yogatārā (योगतारा), the junction star: the one fixed point that ties a nakṣatra (नक्षत्र) to the actual sky. A nakshatra is one of the 27 lodgings the moon works through on its circuit, roughly one a night. In 2018 the International Astronomical Union attached the name Ashlesha to this star, so the station's name now stands beside it in catalogues everywhere. It is also not one star but at least four, going round each other on periods from days to centuries, and I will leave that where it lies.

The last of the five is close: two-thirds of a degree on and slightly south. Rho Hydrae, magnitude 4.3, about 350 light years away.

Stand back from what you have drawn. Down from delta to sigma, east to eta, up to epsilon, one step across to rho. Down, along, up, along. Using the catalogue positions, the shape measures about 3 degrees in each direction. Its two open ends line up level with each other, nearly 3 degrees apart. It is a loop that does not close. That is what a coil is.

Before that shape sets, one correction. The five are not a family. Their distances run from about 130 light years to past 400. The shape is real. The group is not.

Keep the line going east, out of the station, and the first thing you meet is awkward. Zeta Hydrae, less than 2 degrees on, is magnitude 3.1, brighter than anything in the head. The station stops before it. Whoever fixed that boundary was not collecting bright stars. They were drawing a head, and the head was finished.

After zeta the line thins out badly. It runs down and east through a long bare stretch before it reaches Alphard, an orange star of magnitude 2.0 and 177 light years off. The name is Arabic for the solitary one, because nothing bright stands anywhere near it; Latin lists called it the heart of the snake. And then it goes on. Hydra is the largest of the 88 constellations, 1,303 square degrees, running from 8 hours of right ascension to 15. Right ascension is the sky's own east-west clock, so head to tail is close to 7 hours of it. There is no hour at which the whole animal is comfortably in front of you.

So, where to stand. The head wants a sky with some dark in it. The easiest way in is Procyon, the bright white star that comes up behind Orion. Procyon sits at almost exactly the same declination as delta Hydrae, so it rises at the same point on your horizon and about an hour earlier. Mark where Procyon appears, wait the hour, and watch that spot. The head takes about a quarter of an hour to come out of the ground once it starts.

A second way in comes from the station before this one. The faint grey manger of the Beehive stands about 14 degrees due north of the snake's head and clears the horizon around half an hour ahead of it. Find the smudge, drop straight down a fist and a half held at the end of a straight arm, and you are in the right neighbourhood.

On the sidereal reckoning most Indian almanacs keep, the sun crosses this station in roughly the first half of August, so the door is shut for some weeks either side of that. It opens again before dawn in the second half of September, with the head up around three in the morning and 25 degrees high by five. By mid-October it is up before one and 50 degrees high at that same hour. From December it belongs to the evening, and in early March it stands two-thirds of the way up the southern sky at ten at night, which is the sitting to plan for if you would rather keep your sleep. Those figures are Delhi's and slide a little across the country. They come back the same way every year.

One honest thing while you are out. Each of the 27 stations is a slice of the moon's road, 13 degrees and 20 minutes of it, and these five stars are not standing on that road. They lie between 11 and 15 degrees south of the ecliptic, the line the sun keeps to, and the moon strays little more than 5 degrees from it. So the moon has never covered any of them and never will. That is the second time in these files that the star used to mark a station turns out to sit well off the moon's actual path.

Now the name, which is the good part. āśleṣā (आश्लेषा) is built on the root śliṣ, to cling, to stick to, to fold around, with a prefix that turns the action back towards the one doing it. The noun āśleṣa means an embrace, a clasping, close contact, adhesion, two things joined. In Tamil and Malayalam the station is Ayilyam. The symbol the handbooks draw beside it is a coiled snake, which for once is not standing in for anything else. It is the shape.

The presiding figures are not one figure. They are the nāga (नाग), a whole race of them: part human, part serpent, living in Patala, the world underneath. They belong to water: rivers, lakes, wells, the rain, and the crops that wait on it. They also guard treasure. The named ones are large. Shesha holds the world up, and Vasuki was the rope in the churning of the ocean. Their day is Nag Panchami, the fifth of the bright fortnight of the month of Shravana (श्रावण, śrāvaṇa), though several states keep it in the dark fortnight instead. It falls in July or August, which is also when the sun is crossing this patch of sky. I am not going to claim that one explains the other. Both are printed in every panchang.

Ashlesha has a reputation in the marriage-matching tables, and it frightens people. What those score systems are, and what they actually weigh, is another writer's subject in these pages.

What I want is the word, because it is doing two jobs at once and I do not think that is an accident. An embrace and a grip are the same physical act. Which one it is depends on whether the other person can leave. Nearly everybody has been at both ends of that: held at the exact hour they needed holding, and held on to for a good while afterwards. It feels much the same from the inside either way, which is why the one doing the holding is usually the last to know.

That is a subject and not a verdict. There is a whole genre about Ashlesha people being secretive and coiled and hard to read, and I am not adding to it. What the station is good for is a few questions with a person inside them. What am I holding on to. Could I tell the difference between keeping a thing and being kept by it. Who in my life is free to put me down, and who is not.

Then go and find it. Start at the tongue and work back along the face: south to the nostril, east, up to the bright one, one step across, and stop. The line carries on after that, past a star brighter than any you have just looked at, down to the solitary orange heart, and out into hours of sky you will not watch finish tonight. The station is those first 3 degrees, and it is a loop, and it does not close.