The story describes classic stories from Greek mythology with the characters missing, starting with Heracles’s first task of defeating the Nemean Lion. As Heracles is the great-grandson of Andromeda and Perseus, the story then describes how Cassiopeia’s boastfulness and Cepheus’s ineffectiveness required Perseus and his steed Pegasus to save Andromeda from the sea-monster Cetus. Each bracketed number corresponds to a character that is also a constellation of the night sky (numbered in alphabetical order).
The Greek string for each character is a sequence of Bayer designations, the most common way of naming stars in a constellation (e.g. Alpha Centauri). Connecting the dots of each sequence within each constellation constructs a polygon that contains exactly one Bayer star and thus one Greek letter. (See below for examples.)
Extracting these enscribed letters, we get:
ID | Story Order | Mythological Figure | Constellation | Greek String | Enscribed Star |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
[6] | 1 | Nemean Lion | Leo | αηψοπα | ν |
[5] | 2 | Heracles | Hercules | δπηζδ | ε |
[2] | 3 | Cassiopeia | Cassiopeia | γθχδγ | φ |
[1] | 4 | Andromeda | Andromeda | αζηδα | ε |
[3] | 5 | Cepheus | Cepheus | δξνμζδ | λ |
[8] | 6 | Perseus | Perseus | βπρξεβ | ω |
[7] | 7 | Pegasus | Pegasus | βολτβ | μ |
[4] | 8 | Cetus | Cetus | γδκλγ | α |
By ordering via the positions that the IDs appear in the story, the extracted letters read “νεφελωμα”, which, translated from Greek, is our solution, NEBULA
.