Name a Star in Memory

When someone dies, the sky doesn't change. The stars are still there. What changes is that now there is a gap, and you need something to put in it.

Naming a star in memory of someone who has passed is one of the most meaningful things The Starmint does. A memorial star gives grief something to look at: a fixed point in the night sky that is permanently, verifiably named for the person you lost.

Why a Memorial Star

Grief doesn't have many permanent things. Flowers die. Food is eaten. A grave is visited but not carried. The star is permanent in a way that other memorial gestures are not. The Polygon blockchain record of your registration cannot be altered or deleted by anyone — not by us, not by time, not by any company ceasing to exist. The star will always bear that name. The blockchain will always hold the record.

A named star gives you somewhere to return to: on birthdays, on anniversaries of the death, on quiet nights when you want to feel close to someone. Not "somewhere up there" but a precise set of coordinates that you can look up in a planetarium app and find in the sky.

Who Names a Memorial Star

A spouse or partner

When a partner dies, naming a star in their memory is an act of permanent witness. The certificate carries the name, the date and your dedication, and the blockchain record of the registration is permanent. It gives you a specific point in the sky to return to on hard nights.

Children for a parent

Naming a star for a parent who has died gives siblings, grandchildren and other family members something everyone can share. A named star with a dedication written from the whole family becomes a shared point of reference in the sky.

Parents for a child

The death of a child is a grief without parallel. Naming a star for a child — an infant, a young person, or an adult child — creates a permanent memorial that parents and siblings can carry with them wherever they go. The star is in the sky anywhere in the world.

Friends

When a close friend dies and you want to do something that lasts — something beyond the funeral, beyond the first year — naming a star is a way of making the tribute permanent. The dedication message can be anything: a shared memory, a phrase only the two of you would understand, a date that mattered.

As a gift to a grieving family

A memorial star is one of the most meaningful things you can give to a family that has lost someone. It arrives as a certificate documenting a permanent registration in the sky — something the family can hold onto, something they can look at on nights when they miss the person. It doesn't intrude on grief; it honors it.

What to Write in the Dedication

The dedication appears on the certificate and can be up to 570 characters. Some suggestions:

The person's full name and dates: "Margaret Ann Powell, 1941–2024"
A phrase they lived by, a line they'd recognize, a word that was theirs
A date that mattered: a birthday, an anniversary of their death, the day you met
Something written from the heart: "For my father, who taught me to look up"
A note to the person themselves, written as if they'll read it

There is no wrong way to write a dedication for someone you loved. Write what's true.

Choosing the Star

You choose the star yourself. If it matters that the star is in the sky over a particular place, such as where they lived or where you live now, search by location and The Starmint shows you stars in the night sky there. Whether a star can be seen without binoculars depends on its apparent magnitude, the scale of how bright it looks: 6.0 or lower is visible to the unaided eye on a clear, dark night. You can look up your star's magnitude in Stellarium using the identifier on your certificate.

You can also search by constellation and choose one that had meaning to the person — Orion for a hunter, Ursa Major for someone who loved bears, the Southern Cross for someone who lived in Australia.

The Blockchain Record

The Starmint records every registration on the Polygon blockchain — a permanent public ledger. The record does not depend on our company or our servers, and you can open it at any time from the star's page under My Stars with View on Blockchain. For a memorial, the permanence isn't a feature — it's the whole point.