Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. A Bayer designation is a stellar designation in which a specific star is identified by a Greek letter, followed by the genitive form of its parent constellation's Latin name. The original list of Bayer designations contained 1,564 stars. Most of the brighter stars were assigned their first systematic names by the German astronomer Johann Bayer in 1603, in his star atlas Uranometria (named after Urania, the Greek Muse of Astronomy, along with Uranus, the Greek god of the sky and heavens). Bayer assigned a lower-case Greek letter, such as alpha ( ), beta ( ), gamma ( ), etc, to each star he cataloged, combined with the Latin name of the star’s parent constellation in genitive (possessive) form. For example, Aldebaran is designated Tauri (pronounced Alpha Tauri), which means "Alpha of the Bull". (The letters of the Greek alphabet were used in antiquity as numerals, so Bayer's scheme might be regarded as a numbering system.)

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