The asterism formed by the three stars ι, κ and λ Andromedae is called "Andromeda's right hand" in ancient Greek texts and their derivatives. One of the Arabic translations is Kaff al Musalsala /كفّ المسلسة. Herein, al Musalala is from the tranlsation "The Chained Woman" in Isḥāq and Ṣūfī and "Kaff" is for the hand. The variant "Keff al Salsalat" is given in Knobel (1895).^[1]

Etymology and History

Almagest Andromeda in Stellarium, drawn and labelled in Stellarium (Alina Schmidt, Lea Jabschinski, Marie von Seggern and Susanne M. Hoffmann 2021)

Andromeda drawing on the Farnese Globe with a fish (unconnected to the other in Pisces) as her attribute, mapped to Stellarium. When her head is at α And, her right arm cannot be placed at ι, κ, λ And but needs to be placed further east (CC BY Susanne M Hoffmann 2021).

Hand of Andromeda in the Almagest

Andromeda in Arabic texts

• Ἀνδρομέδα > Andrūmāḏā (Isḥāq),
• Andrūmīḏā (Ṣūfī),
• al-Mar’a, the Wife (Ḥağğāğ),
• al-Mar’at al-latī lam tara ba^clan, the Woman who has no husband (Battānī, Ṣūfī),
• al-Mar’at al-Musalsala, the Chained Woman (Isḥāq, Ṣūfī)

Hand of Andromeda

The Chained Woman in as-Sufi in Stellarium by Khalid Al Ajaji.

Andromeda's right arm has always been drawn in the area of the sky with this asterism (until Bode's new invention of the constellation Honores Friderici in 1795).

Spelling Variant:

• "Keff al Salsalat", or "Keffalsalsalat" in Al Mouakket^[2] from Latin transliteration "Manus Catenatae", used for iota Andromedae (ι And).

The star ι And is described as Τῶν ἐπἰ τοῦ δεξιοῦ άκρόχειρον (Halma, II, 48-49), i.e. "at the end of the right hand" together with κ and λ And.

In Arabic, al-Ḥağğāğ translates as ^clā ṭaraf al-kaff, “at the tip of the right palm” and Isḥāq as ^clā ’l-kaff, “on the palm”. Al-Battānī does not mention these stars. As for al-Ṣūfī, he uses also the word al-Kaff in their description, and al-Bīrūnī does the same after him.

Then the following identifications appear chronologically:

Only this one can be taken as a true proper name:

Remarks.

1. al-Aḫsāsī reads al-salasa in the manuscript, which is, as he quotes it (p. 436, n. 31), a scribal error for al-musalsala, "the Chained One." It seems reasonable to reintroduce the exact word.
2. In the transcription currently used, we write kaff and no longer Keff, and the final /t/ of Salsalat is not justified. The name would therefore be Kaff al-Musalsala, which is roughly the spelling used by Mustafa Pular in his catalog for κ And.
3. The stars ι, κ and λ And all three deserve the name Kaff al-musalsala, but their magnitudes are respectively: 4.29, 4.15, and 3.81. As we can see, λ And is the largest.

Mythology

see Andromeda

IAU Working Group on Star Names

κ Andromedae in Stellarium: exoplanet display (Zotti et al. 2020).

Three false color images of the κ And ("Kappa Andromedae") system, generated from data collected in July 2012 with the Subaru Telescope in Hawai'i. In each image, the Super-Jupiter κ And b is visible to the upper left. Image credit: NAOJ / Subaru / J. Carson(College of Charleston) / T. Currie (University Toronto). See MPIA press release for more information.

The name "Keffalsalsalat" was suggested to the IAU WGSN in 2023 due to its appearance in modern literature (Knobel 1895). The name is not in Simbad or anyhow known in the public. From the group of three, lambda would be the brightest, but has an older name (Asīdu); so we would suggest the second brightest, kappa Andromedae (κ And), to be named with the Arabic term. However, we suggest to correct Knobel's spelling from the 19th century and name the star Kaffalmusalsala (كفّ المسلسة) (adapted to the IAU-Style Guide, simplified to pre-Unicode ASCII).

The WGSN chose to adopt the name "Kaffalmusalsala" for κ And in the IAU-CSN.

Weblinks

Reference

• References (general)
• References (early modern)
• Ian Ridpath's website (Star Tales )