I forwarded this inquiry to Geoff Chester at the Planetarium.  He responds to s
everal of these inquiries a year.  Here is his response (his words NOT mine):

***************************************************************
Pamela L. Blalock, Office of Cooperative Programs, NASM MRC 321
Smithsonian Institution                 202/357-4473
Washington, DC  20560                   NASEM013.SIVM
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
To: NASEM013--SIVM

From: Geoff Chester
Subject: Valentines question...

Pam,

This pops up every year around Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Mother's Day
(but curiously *not* so much around Father's Day...)

There are several groups that perform this "service", usually for a nominal
fee of fifty bucks or thereabouts.  What they do is go to a star catalogue,
and the one that's the most concise that's essentially in the public domain
is the SAO Catalogue of some 250,000 stars down to 8th magnitude. This is how
the SI gets dragged into the whole mess.  Anyway, they randomly select a star,
use any one of several slick PC Planetarium programs to generate a star
chart on a laser printer, and highlight the "named" star.  Then they use a
desktop publishing program to crank out a fancy-schmancy looking certificate,
enter the name in a database (that they claim is registered at the LOC and/or
in some Swiss bank vault) and send the results off to you, the eager customer.
So for your $50 you get a couple of pieces of paper and the promise that the
star you have "selected" will be forever named for your dear-departed Aunt
Minnie.  What they don't tell you is that response to this little scam has
been quite brisk...to the point where they are going through the SAO Catalogue
for the 3rd time...so the names for each star are no longer "unique"! You
gotta share it with some Bozo in Frostbite Falls, MN.  It's nice work if
you can get it...and as for "authority" I can do the exact same thing and
I'll only charge you $25 for it!  P. T. Barnum was right....

TTFN
Geoff