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