ALTAIR RESEARCH Projects
altair origins
The history behind a name
Altair, an Arabic word that means “the flying eagle”
It is the 12th brighter star and it is part of Aquila (Eagle) constellation. Together with Deneb and Vega composes the “Summer Triangle”, and you can find it as the lower left corner. It is 16.8 light years far from earth, its radius is about 1.7 times our sun’s one and is 11 times brighter than our star. Its rotational period is 9 hours and it spins rapidly.
If you take a look to the image representing the Summer Triangle (courtesy of https://astrobackyard.com/the-summer-triangle), you can understand where our logo comes from. With a very direct and simple design, we wanted to make visible the link between the laboratory, the stars and what the stars represent for us.
And what about the stain on the background? Well, that’s another story, but if you look at the picture of the spaceship created for the movie the Forbidden Planet you can recognize it. Actually, in that movie appears one of the most famous robots of all the times: Robby.
Stars mean bewitch unknown and desire of knowledge since the dawn of mankind. So we stopped looking for a name for the laboratory when we focus on the name of a star: Altair.
This name is a great acronym that explain our aim and recall our sense of challenge and research.
Ok, now I got the reason behind the name and logo, but what about your website address?
Well, metropolis is actually the server’s name. For a long time we did not had an external DNS.
And why you chose that? Why not Altair? or Aquila?
Because it is a cool and very old movie, then Aquila was already the name of NAS.
In 1927 Fritz Lang created one of the first movies, with Dr. Smith’s automaton and L’uomo meccanico, where an anthropomorphic robot appears. In Metropolis, a silent movie, the genius of Lang shows a futuristic and chaotic town. It is impressive that you can find the, maybe, first cyborg in cinema history (try to look at the hand of robot’s creator), and a video telephone really in advance.
