Some additional information, courtesy of constellation-guide.com.

Lupus Constellation

Lupus constellation lies in the southern hemisphere, between Centaurus 

and Scorpius. Its name means “the wolf” in Latin.

Lupus was first catalogued by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd 

century. Even though it is an old constellation, Lupus is not associated with 

any myths.The constellation is home to several interesting stars and deep sky 

objects. These include the historic supernova remnant SN 1006, the globular 

clusters NGC 5824 and NGC 5986, and the Retina Nebula 

(IC 4406).

FACTS, LOCATION & MAP 

Lupus is the 46th constellation in size, occupying an area of 334 square degrees. It is located in the third

 quadrant of the southern hemisphere (SQ3) and can be seen at latitudes between +35° and -90°. The 

neighboring constellations are Centaurus, Circinus, Hydra, Libra, Norma and Scorpius.

Lupus belongs to the Hercules family of constellations, along with Aquila, Ara, Centaurus, Corona Australis, Corvus, Crater, Crux, Cygnus, Hercules, Hydra, Lyra, Ophiuchus, Sagitta, Scutum, Sextans, Serpens, Triangulum Australe and Vulpecula.

Lupus contains two stars with known planets and no Messier objects. The brightest star in the constellation is Men, Alpha Lupi, with an apparent magnitude of 2.30. There are no meteor showers associated with the constellation.

Lupus does not contain any formally named stars.

Lupus Constellation Map, by IAU and Sky&Telescope magazine

STORY 

The stars that now form the constellation Lupus used to be part of Centaurus constellation. They represented a sacrificed animal impaled by the centaur. The centaur was holding it toward the constellation Ara, the altar.

The constellation was not associated with any animal in particular until the Renaissance times, when the Latin translation of Ptolemy’s work identified it with the wolf.

Lupus constellation, image: Till Credner

The Greeks knew the constellation as Therium, a wild animal, and the Romans called it Bestia, the beast. In Greek times, the constellation was probably taken to represent a creature based on the Babylonian figure of the Mad Dog. The creature was a hybrid, with a human head and torso and legs and tail of a lion. The creature was frequently associated with the sun god and Bison-man, which is another creature from myth, and it was called UR.IDIM, with UR referring to a large carnivore, which could have been a lion, wolf, or a dog.

MAJOR STARS IN LUPUS 

α Lupi (Alpha Lupi) 

Alpha Lupi is the brightest star in Lupus constellation. It has an apparent magnitude of 2.30 and is approximately 460 light years distant from Earth. It is a blue-white giant star with the stellar classification B1.5III. It is ten times more massive than the Sun and about 25,000 times more luminous.

Alpha Lupi is classified as a Beta Cephei variable. It exhibits periodic variations in luminosity, by about 0.03, as a result of pulsations in the atmosphere. It has a period of 0.29585 days, which translates into about 7 hours and 6 minutes.

β Lupi (Beta Lupi)

Beta Lupi is the second brightest star in the constellation. It has an apparent magnitude of 2.68 and is approximately 383 light years distant from Earth.

The star can easily be seen without binoculars. Like Alpha Lupi, it is classified as a Beta Cephei variable. It is a multi-period variable, with a dominant period of 0.232 days.

Beta Lupi is a blue-white giant belonging to the stellar class B2 III. It is believed to be about 25 million years old.

The star has about 8.8 solar masses and a relatively high proper motion. It is located near the supernova remnant SN 1006.

γ Lupi (Gamma Lupi)

Gamma Lupi is a blue-white subgiant star in Lupus. It is the third brightest star in Lupus. It belongs to the stellar class B2 IV. It has an apparent magnitude of 2.77 and is approximately 420 light years distant from the solar system. It is in fact a close binary system in which the primary component is itself a spectroscopic binary star, one that has an orbital period of 2.8081 days.

δ Lupi (Delta Lupi) 

Delta Lupi is another blue-white subgiant with the stellar classification B1.5 IV. It has an apparent magnitude of 3.22 and is approximately 900 light years distant from the Sun.

The star is about 10,000 times more luminous than the Sun and has 12 times the mass. It has a radius 6.1 times solar. The star is believed to be about 15 million years old.

Delta Lupi is also classified as a Beta Cephei variable. It has a period of 0.1655 days, or six cycles per day.

ε Lupi (Epsilon Lupi)

Epsilon Lupi is another multiple star system in Lupus. It has a visual magnitude of 3.41 and is approximately 510 light years distant from the Sun.

Epsilon Lupi is a so-called double-lined spectroscopic binary. When the system’s spectrum is examined, both stars’ absorption line features can be observed. The lines shift back and forth as the stars orbit each other. The two stars have not yet been resolved through a telescope. They share a close orbit with a period of 4.55970 days.

The binary system has a companion separated by 26.5 seconds of arc that may be orbiting the binary star with a period of 64 years.

The Epsilon Lupi system has a combined stellar classification B2 IV-V, and the individual stars are thought to have spectral classes of B3 IV (blue-white subgiant), B3 V (blue-white dwarf), and A5 V (white dwarf).

ζ Lupi (Zeta Lupi)

Zeta Lupi is a yellow giant star belonging to the stellar class G7III. It has an apparent magnitude of 3.41 and is approximately 116 light years distant from the Sun.

η Lupi (Eta Lupi)

Eta Lupi is a blue-white subgiant with the stellar classification of B2.5 IV. It has an apparent magnitude of 3.41 and is approximately 493 light years distant from the solar system.

ι Lupi (Iota Lupi)

Iota Lupi is another class B subgiant. It has the stellar classification B2.5IV and is approximately 352 light years distant from Earth. The star has a visual magnitude of 3.54.

φ Lupi (Phi Lupi) 

The designation Phi Lupi is shared by two separate stars. Phi-1 Lupi is an orange giant with the stellar classification K5 III. It has an apparent magnitude of 3.58 and is approximately 326 light years distant from Earth.

Phi-2 Lupi is a blue-white main sequence star belonging to the stellar class B4V. It has an apparent magnitude of 4.52 and is approximately 606 light years distant from the solar system.

π Lupi (Pi Lupi)

Pi Lupi is a star in a double system. It has an apparent magnitude of 3.98 and is approximately 497 light years distant from the Sun. It belongs to the spectral class B5.

KT Lupi (114 G. Lupi) 

KT Lupi is a blue-white subgiant star with the stellar classification of B3IVp. It has an apparent magnitude of 4.54 and is approximately 434 light years distant from Earth. It is a Be star, a class B star with strong hydrogen emission lines and distinctive forbidden neutral or low ionization emission lines in its spectrum.

τ Lupi (Tau Lupi) 

Tau Lupi is a designation shared by Tau-1 Lupi, a blue-white subgiant star belonging to the stellar class B2IV with an apparent magnitude of 4.55, and Tau-2 Lupi, an F7-class star with a visual magnitude of 4.36. Tau-1 Lupi is approximately 1,035 light years distant, and Tau-2 is located about 314 light years from Earth. Tau-1 Lupi is classified as a Beta Cephei variable star.

1 Lupi 

1 Lupi is a yellow-white bright giant star with the stellar classification F1II. It has an apparent magnitude of 4.91 and is approximately 1,140 light years distant.

ν Lupi (Nu Lupi)

Nu Lupi is a designation shared by two stars, Nu-1 Lupi and Nu-2 Lupi. Nu-1 Lupi is a yellow-white star halfway between the subgiant and giant evolutionary stage. It has the stellar classification of F6III-IV. The star has an apparent magnitude of 5.00 and is approximately 111 light years distant from the solar system.

Nu-2 Lupi is a yellow main sequence star only 48.3 light years from Earth. It is very similar to the Sun, but has a significantly lower metallicity. Nu-2 Lupi has an abnormally high velocity. It has a mass 1.02 times solar and a radius 1.01 solar. It is 0.99 times as luminous as the Sun and has a rotational velocity of 2 km/s.

Three planets were discovered orbiting Nu-2 Lupi in September 2011. The innermost and outermost ones are super-Earths, with masses 5.28 and 9.59 times that of the Earth. Super-Earths are extrasolar planets that are more massive than Earth, but substantially less massive than the smaller gas giants in the solar system (Uranus and Neptune). The middle planet is too massive to be a super-Earth, with a mass 11.38 times that of our planet. All three planets orbit the star within 0.5 astronomical units, which means that they are likely too hot for life.

GQ Lupi

GQ Lupi is an orange main sequence star classified as a T Tauri variable. It has an apparent magnitude of 11.40 and is approximately 500 light years distant from Earth. The star has about 70 percent of the Sun’s mass and is less than 2 million years old.

A substellar object, GQ Lupi b, was discovered orbiting the star in 2005. It was one of the first extrasolar planet candidates to be directly imaged.

GQ Lupi – The feeble point of light to the right of the star is the newly found cold companion. It is 250 times fainter than the star itself and it located 0.73 arc seconds west. At the distance of GQ Lupi, this corresponds to a distance of roughly 100 astronomical units. North is up and East is to the left. Image: ESO

RU Lupi 

RU Lupi is a yellow star with the stellar classification of G5V:e. It has an apparent magnitude of 10.519 and is approximately 400 light years distant from Earth. It is another T Tauri variable star in Lupus, a very young, low-mass star that has not quite reached the main sequence stage. It is believed to be between 2 and 3 million years old.

RU Lupi exhibits random variations in brightness, including fluctuations in ultraviolet and X-ray emissions. It has 60-70 percent of the Sun’s mass, 1.6 times the solar radius, and is more than twice as luminous as the Sun. The star is surrounded by a circumstellar disk of dust.

RU Lupi has an unconfirmed substellar companion in its orbit. If the companion exists, it has a mass at least 27 times that of Jupiter and orbits the star with a period of 3.71 days.

SN 1006 

SN 1006 is a historic supernova, seen between April 30 and May 1 of the year 1006 in the constellation Lupus by observers across the world.

It occurred at a distance of 7,200 light years from Earth and it was the brightest stellar event ever documented. It is believed to have been a Type Ia supernova and it reached a visual magnitude of -7.5.

The supernova remnant was identified in 1965 as the previously known radio source PKS 1459-41, located near the star Beta Lupi.

No companions of the progenitor star were found, which suggests that the supernova had a double degenerate progenitor and was a result of the merging of two white dwarf stars.

Lupus-TR-3 

Lupus-TR-3 is a dim orange main sequence star in Lupus. It has an apparent magnitude of 17.4 and is approximately 8,950 light years distant from Earth. It has the stellar classification of K1V.

An exoplanet, Lupus-TR-3 b, was discovered in the star’s orbit in 2007. The planet has 0.81 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits the star with a period of 3.91405 days. It is the faintest transiting planet ever detected using ground-based methods (transit method).

DEEP SKY OBJECTS IN LUPUS 

NGC 5986 

NGC 5986 is a globular cluster in the constellation. It is 33,900 light years distant from Earth.

The cluster is notable because it contains two very bright A-F class stars which are likely in their last stage of evolution off the asymptotic giant branch.

The cluster has an apparent magnitude of 7.52. It can be found 2.5 degrees to the west-northwest of the star Eta Lupi.

Retina Nebula – IC 4406

IC 4406 is a planetary nebula in Lupus, located near the constellation’s western border. It is 2,000 light years distant from Earth.

IC 4406 is a bipolar nebula, seen from the side when viewed from Earth. Its left and right side appear almost symmetrical.

Retina Nebula – The Hubble telescope reveals a rainbow of colors in this dying star, called IC 4406. Like many other so-called planetary nebulae, IC 4406 exhibits a high degree of symmetry. The nebula’s left and right halves are nearly mirror images of the other. If we could fly around IC 4406 in a spaceship, we would see that the gas and dust form a vast donut of material streaming outward from the dying star. We don’t see the donut shape in this photograph because we are viewing IC 4406 from the Earth-orbiting Hubble telescope. From this vantage point, we are seeing the side of the donut. This side view allows us to see the intricate tendrils of material that have been compared to the eye’s retina. In fact, IC 4406 is dubbed the “Retina Nebula.”

If we were viewing it from the top, it would appear similar to the Ring Nebula (Messier 57) in Lyra constellation.

NGC 5822 

NGC 5822 is a large open cluster approximately 6,000 light years from Earth.

It has an apparent magnitude of 10.28. It is located 3 degrees to the southwest of the star Zeta Lupi.

NGC 5824

NGC 5824 is another globular cluster in Lupus. It has an apparent magnitude of 9.09 and is 104,400 light years distant from the solar system.

The cluster is located near the western border with Centaurus constellation. It can be seen in a small telescope, but its stellar core can only be resolved with a larger aperture.

NGC 5749 

NGC 5749 is another open cluster in Lupus. It is about 8 arc minutes in diameter and has an apparent magnitude of 11.23.

The cluster was discovered by James Dunlop in 1826.

NGC 5882 

NGC 5882 is another planetary nebula in Lupus. It has an apparent magnitude of 9.4.

NGC 5927 

NGC 5927 is a globular cluster in Lupus, located near the border with the constellation Norma.

It has an apparent magnitude of 8.01 and is approximately 24,800 light years distant from Earth.

The cluster was discovered by James Dunlop in 1826.

Imagining Bestia Centauri "Live"

Technological innovation has made possible solo live performances that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. As a result, such excellent sonically immersive artists and comrades-in-arms as Lustmord and Black Mountain Transmitter are now able to offer very effective performances in concert.

This fact led me to imagine, hypothetically, what a live Bestia Centauri performance might be in an ideal world. Almost needless to say, the financing, the demand, and most likely the technology for such a performance is non-existent. But what if...?

One idea for a Bestia Centauri live event would be to create a wholly immersive environment using either holograms or VR headsets. Bestia Centauri would establish, say, a week-long residence at a difficult-to-locate venue, and audiences would be limited to fifteen or twenty persons per "performance". The venue would be decorated to resemble an old-fashioned mental institution, and audience members would be either seated in chairs or lying on gurneys (straitjackets optional for those especially adventurous audients who might want to try to replicate the out-of-the body experiences and past life regressions of Darrell Standing in Jack London's oneiric 1915 novel The Star Rover).

Bestia Centauri would play parts live, accompanied as needed by backing "tapes". Each audience member would be connected to monitors, so that Bestia Centauri would receive basic physiological information from random audients (brain waves, temperature, heart rate). Bestia Centauri would then modify the backing, the sound, the volume, the lighting, and even the room temperature accordingly.

Another idea would be to perform the music, as described above, but to have the audience in an induced hypnagogic state, in which they are balanced equally between waking and dreaming. Or perhaps the audience would be fully asleep, and the sounds would be adjusted according to EEG feedback, particularly during the REM stages of sleep.

An impossible dream for an impossible project.

Absolutissimae Primi Mobilis Tabulae II

Absolutissimae Primi Mobilis Tabulae I

Unusual Star Discovered in the Lupus Constellation

"For more than four hundred years, astronomers have used telescopes to study the great variety of stars in our galaxy.

Millions of distant suns have been catalogued. There are dwarf stars, giant stars, dead stars, exploding stars, binary stars; by now, you might suppose that every kind of star in the Milky Way had been seen.

That's why a recent discovery is so surprising. Researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii have found a star with spiral arms. The name of the star is SAO 206462. It's a young star more than four hundred light years from Earth in the constellation Lupus, the wolf. SAO 206462 attracted attention because it has a circumstellar disk--that is, a broad disk of dust and gas surrounding the star. 

Researchers strongly suspected that new planets might be coalescing inside the disk, which is about twice as wide as the orbit of Pluto.When they took a closer look at SAO 206462 they found not planets, but arms.

Astronomers have seen spiral arms before: they’re commonly found in pinwheel galaxies where hundreds of millions of stars spiral together around a common core.

Finding a clear case of spiral arms around an individual star, however, is unprecedented.

The arms might be a sign that planets are forming within the disk."

(First reported from http://www.messagetoeagle.com; original story no longer available.)

Brazilian Bestia Centauri T-Shirts???

This world never ceases to amaze me. I'd rather be back in Lupus.

Bestia Centauri Reviews--Some Favorite Comments

Below are some of my favorite comments from reviews that have been written over the years about Bestia Centauri's music  I am especially glad to note the humor in some of them. Although the music and the intent behind it are perfectly serious, it is also silly to take the concept or the project with utter po-faced gravity.


Christopher Donovan, Somnambulant Corpse Recordings:

"The projection of an inhuman perception, alien, hovering at absolute zero in the cold vastness of space".

Achtung! Baby:

"31 minutes of Eternity, Oblivion, and Fear, the sound of a voiceless wind, lingering groans of giant ruins, a confession of stars, and agonized poundings with a womb of flesh."

Seven:

"[O]pens with the groan of the unknown, of the deepest slobbering black holes of disease, and shimmering sounds like the twinkle of stars before death. Gurgling, spasmodic, throaty nuances follow, sounding like the unspeakable language that Lovecraft created, only garbled into incomprehensibility. [...]

The tones littered throughout these tracks brim with unearthly allegiance, gobbling stars and the blackest void itself, birthing obscenities of no beastly compare via mutilating the electro-acoustic and the electronically perverse. The whole presentation is an invitation to the sonic equivalent of Cthulhu's sonic masturbatorium. The aural definition of weird!"

LD-50:

"As if a mad artist would sit in front of the Photoshop of creation. I don't want to know what creatures can be invoked with this".

Ortus Obscurum:

"Like a gigantic cosmic vortex, this is not for the weak-minded!"

Industrial.org:

[A]n oily kind of blackness, slippery and difficult to clean off. Organic sounds make an appearance as well and somehow as unlikely as they are, always hit like the peripheral scream of Silent Hill or Half Life. [...]

Initially you become comfortable with the surroundings, strange as they seem. But just as you become conditioned to your environment something so fucking horrible and alien occurs that you are just locked in place, paralysis easier than dealing with the impossible wrongness of it. Like suddenly realizing the gentle rain upon your face is actually droplets of blood cascading down from the swinging corpses of everyone you have ever loved. Or that the prickly label scratching your neck is actually the barbed end of some ghastly alien tentacle snaking out from beneath your now writhing clothing".

Interview With Ortus Obscurum

The following is an interview, Bestia Centauri’s first, conducted with a short-lived Swedish Web ‘zine called Ortus Obscurum.

BESTIA CENTAURI INTERVIEW

Ectonaut: Please introduce Bestia Centauri to our readers. What is Bestia Centauri all about? For how long have you been doing this and for what reason?

Bestia Centauri (“BC”): The public face of Bestia Centauri is a solo electronic music project that I initiated in 1999. By “electronic music”, I simply mean electronically produced music that utilizes modern sound synthesis algorithms. My work has nothing to do with the contemporary rave or dance music to which the label “electronic music” is often misapplied. There are other elements of this project, as well, but they are too personal to speak of at present. The curious reader can get an inkling of these other aspects of Bestia Centauri from the brief and slightly (but only slightly) tongue-in-cheek description of the project posted at www.somnambulantcorpse.com. As for my motivation, I do what I do purely as a source of pleasure and inspiration, and, more specifically, to create music that I would enjoy hearing but have not found elsewhere.

Ectonaut: Tell us something about the tracks on Ubbo-Sathla. Did you work with specific methods when you composed them? Is there a concept behind this release or anything else interesting that you think we should know about Ubbo-Sathla?

BC: The name of the title track derives from a short story by Clark Ashton Smith. Ubbo-Sathla is an interstellar entity who spawns “the grisly prototypes of terrene life”, and to whom all such life must eventually return. The Night Land II is inspired by William Hope Hodgson’s novel of (almost) the same name. The Catacombs of Ptolemais is a phrase from Poe’s prose-poem “Shadow–A Parable”. I intend to wean myself of over-reliance on literary references in the future, but these themes well illustrate various aspects of the “cosmicist” element that Bestia Centauri both represents and embodies. The aim is to create a sense of the numinous, the horrific, and the extra-human.

As for my methods, I work intuitively and spontaneously—at least, as much as software-based synthesis allows—but I do make a conscious effort to use a variety of tools and to make certain that the music possesses a certain flow. As Chris Franke once said, speaking of the music of early Tangerine Dream (I paraphrase), “Sometimes it’s a trickle, sometimes it’s a waterfall, but the music always flows”. I also take care to use, as much and as best I can, the sophisticated software employed more often in “pure” computer music or electro-acoustic music. The use of such tools has been the exclusive province of tediously intellectual academic composers or Post-Modern ironists for far too long.

Ectonaut: How would you describe the music of Bestia Centauri to completely new listeners? Do you feel that Bestia Centauri belong to a certain genre? Are there any bands that you think you can relate to soundwise and conceptwise?

BC: Apart from the general rubric of electronic music, I do not think that the sounds of Bestia Centauri fit into any genre. If pressed, though, I would say that my music falls somewhere between non-rhythmic dark ambient “soundscapes” and electro-acoustic music, with a slight bias toward one or the other in a given piece. Offhand, I cannot think of too many projects like my own. Although what I am doing is rather different, the early music of Tangerine Dream (circa1972-1975) has been a tremendous source of inspiration to me, as are certain of the works of the composer Gyorgy Ligeti (Atmospheres; Lux Aeterna; Lontano). Among much older works of electro-acoustic or tape music, I’m very fond of the music of Tod Dockstader and of Myron Schaeffer’s soundtrack to the film The Mask. As for more recent projects, of course, there’s much that I haven’t heard, but I’ve been most impressed so far by the work of Chaos As Shelter. Robert Scott Thompson is a contemporary composer of ambient and electro-acoustic music whose work I admire.

Ectonaut: What is most important in music according to you? How do you define quality music? What are your musical influences?

BC: I’ve answered the question about sources of inspiration (I prefer this term to the word influences) above. What is most important to me in music, as well as in anything else, is that it convey a sense of something poetic, imaginative, cosmic, Lovecraftian, and utterly beyond the human. “Quality music” to me is most likely to arise when the musician creates it out of a sense of inner necessity relating to the music itself, and not out of the usual social or egotistical motivations: that sort of, “Hey, look at me” mentality that is so prevalent everywhere today, but especially in the United States. I would certainly continue to do what I am doing whether there were any prospects for my music’s release or not.

Ectonaut: What plans do you have for the future? Are there any new Bestia Centauri releases planned? Anything else you would like to add?

BC: I plan to work at my own pace for as long as it gives me pleasure to do so, and to pursue the impossible goal of eventually replicating in spirit “the music of Erich Zann”! A piece entitled The Night Land will appear, I hope, within the next couple of months on an Afe Records compilation entitled No Abiding Places. Another, as yet-untitled, work will appear on a forthcoming Somnambulant Corpse compilation tribute to H.P. Lovecraft entitled The Outsider. There may also be a full-length release later this year.

Thank you for initiating this interview, and for taking an interest in such a new and obscure musical project!

More On The Bestia Centauri Constellation

Cited from Richard Hinckley Allen, Star Names, Their Lore and Meaning (1899):

” ‘. . . another form that men of other days have called the beast.’

Poste’s Aratus.

Lupus, the Wolf, is the Loup of the French, Lupo with the Italians, and Wolff in Germany, an idea for the figure said to be from the astrologers’ erroneous translation of Al Fahd, the Arabian title for this constellation, their Leopard, or Panther; although Suidas, the Greek lexicographer of 970, is reported to have called it Κνηκίας, a word for the wolf found in the fables of Babrias of the century before our era. The Greeks and the Romans did not specially designate these stars, and thought of them merely as a Wild Animal, the Θηρίον of Aratos, Hipparchos, and Ptolemy; the Bestia of Vitruvius; Fera of Germanicus; Quadrupes vasta of Cicero; Hostia, the Victim, of Hyginus; Hostiola, cited by Bayer; Bestia Centauri, by Riccioli; and Victima Centauri.

The Wolf reappeared as Lupus in the Alfonsine Tables, and as Fera Lupus in the Latin Almagests, while Grotius said that Panthera was Capella’s name for it.

Bayer also had Equus masculus and Leaena; and La Lande, Leo Marinus, Deferens leonem, Canis ululans, Leopardus, Lupa, Martius, — wolf being sacred to Mars, — and Lycisca, the Hybrid of the wolf. Belua, the Monster, is found in early works.

The Arabians also called it Al Asadah, the Lioness, — found by Scaliger repeated on a Turkish planisphere and cited by Bayer as Asida, — and Al Sabuʽ, the Wild Beast, Chilmead’s Al Subahh. But the Desert astronomers seem to have mixed some of its smaller stars with a part of the Centaur as Al Shamārīḣ, the Palm Branches, and Ḳaḍb al Karm, the Vine Branch.

Zibu, the Beast, of Euphratean cylinders, may be for this constellation; and Urbat, the Beast of Death, or the Star of the Dead Fathers, is a title for it attributed to the Akkadians.

Caesius said that in Persia it was Bridemif, but Hyde, commenting on this from Albumasar, asserted that the word should be Birdūn, the Pack-horse, and was really intended for the Centaur.

Aratos wrote of it, ‘another creature very firmly clutched,’ and ‘the Wild-beast which the Centaur’s right hand holds’ as an offering to the gods upon the Altar, and so virtually a part of the Centaur; but Eratosthenes described it as a Wine-skin from which the Centaur was about to pour a libation; while others imagined both the Beast and the Wine-skin in the Centaur’s grasp.

Mythologists thought it the animal into which Lycaon was changed; Caesius, that it was the Wolf to which Jacob likened Benjamin; but Julius Schiller saw in its stars Benjamin himself.

Although very ancient, Lupus is inconspicuous, lying partly in the Milky Way, south of Libra and Scorpio, east of the Centaur, with no star larger than 2.6 magnitude, while the few visible in the latitude of New York City — γ, δ, λ, and μ — are even smaller than this.

Gould enumerates 159 naked-eye stars, among which is an unusual proportion of doubles.

α, 2.6, seems to be unnamed except in China, where it was Yang Mun or Men, the South Gate.

On the Euphrates it probably was Kakkab Su‑gub Gud‑Elim, the Star Left Hand of the Horned Bull, said to have been a reference to the Centaur that was thus figured in that valley.

It culminates on the 14th of June, nearly due south from Arcturus and north of α Centauri.

β is the Ke Kwan, of the Reeves list of Chinese titles, a Cavalry Officer. This is a very close binary, of 3 and 3.5 magnitudes, both yellow, 0ʺ.25 apart, the position angle being 90°.

α and β are below the horizon of New York City.

Other Chinese asterisms appear within the boundaries of Lupus, all bearing titles pertaining to military affairs, and so of the second period of their star-naming.”

KUNM-FM, New Mexico, Radio Playlist

As you can see below, Bestia Centauri found itself in some interesting and unusual musical company in 2003, especially for a so-called "Dark Ambient" project.

A Note On The Self-Immolation Rite

As detailed in the accompanying booklet to our version of The Self-Immolation Rite (SIR), the project originated when a pseudonymous person who claimed to be a member of a so-called "Traditional Satanist" group contacted Bestia Centauri. He asked whether we would be interested in re-mixing the original version of the SIR. We considered the request, and then counter-proposed an entirely new version of the SIR. Our interlocutor replied enthusiastically. So, off we went to work.

On the other hand, even then, in 2003-2004, we had strong reservations regarding this particular group's underlying seriousness and integrity. For that reason, we kept a wary distance from it. The basic idea of the SIR, however, seemed a worthwhile theme to explore musically.

Our point now is simply this: Had we known then what we currently know about the group in question, we would never have agreed to have anything to do with them, or to blend our name with theirs in any way. At most, Bestia Centauri and these "Satanists" used one another in furtherance of their respective aims. That is the best that can be said of this particular collaboration.

Today, Bestia Centauri does not wish to be associated in any way with this or any such group. We have nothing to do with the "occult" or with pseudo-esoteric "Orders", except to use them on a thematic level--which is, as a rule, all they are good for. 

We also have no regard or respect whatsoever for most of the individuals that that particular group of so-called "Traditional Satanists" comprises, and we prefer that the thematic aspect of our SIR be viewed for the purely historical artifact that it is. We will, however, allow that these people are clever gamesters. But Bestia Centauri has its own game to play, and plays strictly by its own rules.

In that vein, and as to the music of The Self-Immolation Rite itself, it should stand or fall on its own merit.

Theatrum Mundi et Temporis (Joanne Paulo Gallucio, Venezia 1588)

A bit of historical information about the Bestia Centauri constellation, for those who may be interested.