Astronomy is like any other discipline, one with its own unique language and special heroes. And like the other disciplines many of these words and names get twisted about or misunderstood or are just plain hard to say. Here are only a few of the many examples I’ve picked up over years of teaching this divine discipline.

The term “astronomy” itself is one that is often misunderstood. When telling someone that I teach astronomy I often get a response that goes something like, “Oh, and what sign are you?” or “Do you know how to do horoscopes?” I have to explain then, in the nicest way of course, that what I teach is the science of astronomy, the study of the heavens, not astrology, its pseudoscientific etymological cousin.

When I tell my class that the next chapter we’ll be looking at is about cosmology, there is always the one well meaning, if not well read, student who exclaims something like, “What do make-up and lipstick got to do with stars?” Once I come to, I explain - in the nicest way, of course - that cosmology is the study of the entire universe from birth to impending death. It is not cosmetology, the study of cosmetics and their many interesting uses.

There are plenty of candy references I get to put up with, too. Besides the obvious planetary namesake that is the Mars bar, which recently went down the Street of Discontinued Candies - but which you can still get on eBay! - there is the astronomically christened Milky Way bar.

Recently it has been discovered that our galaxy, the real Milky Way, has a bar-shaped thicket of stars through its center. Our home is classified as a “barred spiral galaxy.” But don’t make the mistake of asking what the bar in the Milky Way is made of unless you want to hear the quirky answer, “Fluffy milk chocolate?” followed by some goofy laughter.

And, yes, there really is a type of cosmic phenomenon called a Starburst. And no, it is not composed of a multi-colored assortment of chewy fruit-flavored candy. It is a place of intense starbirth that can light up entire areas of galaxies.
Then there is the stockpile of singular names of astronomers past and present. I can lose a class for a couple minutes by just mentioning or trying to pronounce some of these names.

For example, Annie Jump Cannon is not a complete, but ungrammatical sentence about a woman leaping over a large cylindrical weapon. It is the real name of a very famous pioneering woman astronomer who was first to classify stars – over a half million of them - back in the early 20th century.

Other tongue-twisting topliners are Tycho Brahe, the great pretelescopic Danish observer; Karl Schwarzschild, a pioneer in the field of black holes; the extraordinarily eccentric Fritz Zwicky out of Caltech, one of the first astronomers to consider the now vital tool of gravitational lensing; Enjar Hertzsprung, another Danish astronomer who, with another astronomer by the relatively lackluster name of Henry Russell, gave us the most famous star diagram in astronomy.

In my opinion, though, the king of all names unique, and the moniker that offers a great chance for me to embarrass myself in front of my class, belongs to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (pictured here). He was the world-class astronomer who helped define the mass limits of dead stars called white dwarfs. Mercifully for me, everyone called him Chandra for short. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, a cutting-edge tool for discovering the invisible universe, was named for him.

And, of course, even astronomy has its share of wordplay in the form of off-color double entendres. But I won’t foul this column with any of them except to ask you – in the nicest way, of course - to pronounce the seventh planet out, Uranus, with the accent on the first syllable, something like “YOUR-un-us.” If we all pronounced it that way, astronomy instructors could trade in hours of snickers for quality learning time.