Astronomers are terrible at names. It seems like every name we come up with, whether for the mind-blowingly huge and complex structures in the heavens, or our own telescopes, is either a statement of the obvious or a criminally boring catalog number.

Take our own solar system. There's a titanic storm system on Jupiter so large that three Earths would be engulfed in its shrieking winds. It has been blowing out of control for at least 400 years (since we humans invented the first telescope to see it). What did we call this dramatic, celestial wonder? The Great Red Spot.

Or what about the similar Earth-sized storm on Neptune, which, with winds clocked at almost 2,000 miles per hour, has the most violent weather ever observed? That would be the Great Dark Spot.

Under construction in Chile is a new observatory with four telescopes, each 25 feet across, that will be able to be combined into a single, giant instrument, enabling astronomers to see the first building blocks of galaxies billions of light years away, as well as pick out new planets orbiting other stars. This wonder has been christened the VLT, which stands for - I kid you not - the Very Large Telescope.

After I show people lovely pictures of colliding galaxies and newborn stars, they are justifiable angry when they ask what their names are, and I respond: "Well, this star here is HD149404, and I think that galaxy is NGC2207 and IC2163." Whatever happened to names like the Andromeda Galaxy, or the Magellanic Clouds? Why don't stars still have names like Sirius, Rigel, or Zubenalgenub?

The reason for stars and galaxies, at least, to have boring names is actually quite simple. After the advent of the telescope, there are simply too many stars to name. Even Galileo, when he first turned a crude spyglass to the Milky Way, was startled to find that the dim, white glow was actually made of thousands and thousands of tiny stars. Too many to count, let alone name.

Long ago, ancient astronomers named most of the brightest stars in the sky, the ones most easily seen with the naked eye. The Arab astronomers contributed the largest number of names, and in my opinion, most beautiful ones: Algol, Betelgeuse, Spica, Aldebarran, among others. Greek astronomers named some (Sirius), and Romans a few more (Regulus). But these days, who would have the time (or the desire), to try and name the hundreds of billions of stars just in our own galaxy? And there are billions of other galaxies. In the best scientific tradition, astronomers had to come up with a system to deal with the huge amount of data that confronted them.

These days, stars are designated by a number that functions much like a Social Security number. It's a convenient way to track down a specific star, out of the millions in the sky. The International Astronomical Union (IAU), which is responsible for the naming and cataloging of stars, has set up several easy-to-use numbering systems.

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