Stars for Apollo

A catalogue of 37 stars distributed across the sky was programmed into the rope memory of the onboard computer. There w’ere some quite faint stars in the list, but this w’as only because the brightest stars are unevenly distributed across the sky. Planners had w’anted to ensure that irrespective of the direction in which the fixed line of sight of the optics was pointed, the crew7 would find a star sufficiently bright within the range of the movable line of sight to view through the sextant. Haeh star had a numerical code in base eight (octal) so that the crewman could tell the computer which star he wished to use. or in other cases the computer w’ould indicate the star that it had chosen for a specific operation.

Some of the objects in the Apollo star list were not stars at all. Three numbers were set aside so that the Sun. Moon and Harth could be referenced by the crewman for other tasks, and there w’as also a code that allowed a ‘planet’ to be defined if needed. In fact this could be any celestial object and in some cases, this ’planet’ was actually a star, just not one that the computer knew about.

Three of the fainter stars in this list have unconventional names that were added as a practical joke by the crew of the ill-fated Apollo 1 during their training. Star 03,

Navi, is the middle name of Gus Grissom (Ivan) spelled backwards. Likewise, his two crewmates added oblique references to themselves among the Apollo star list: Star 17, Regor, is the first name of Roger Chaffee spelled backwards; and Edward White II gave his generational suffix to the prank by spelling ‘second’ backwards as Dnoces and applying it to Star 20. The people of Apollo kept these names in their literature as a mark of respect to a fallen crew and they have been known to appear in a few star atlases and books in succeeding years.