Al-Miġzal

Authors: Khalid Al-Ajaji, Susanne M Hoffmann

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Star chart of the Arabian asterism al-Miġzal (المِغْزَل). (CC BY Khalid AlAjaji 2026).

al-Miġzal (Arabic: المِغْزَل), “the wool spindle” is an Arabic name for the stars forming a cross shape in Cygnus.

Provenance, Etymology, History

The name al-Miġzal is used regionally in central Saudi Arabia. It comes from an indigenous star knowledge of the ancient Arabs living in the Arabian Peninsula prior to the Greek astronomy influence in the ninth century. AlAjaji elaborates in Stellarium:

The star knowledge of the ancient Arabs had been recorded and preserved in old poetry and in the old works of Arab philologists and lexicographers of the Islamic civilization. Many books were written on the subject of star knowledge and anwāʾ [Arabic الأنواء], the Arabic knowledge of meteorology. The editors of Ibn Qutaybah's Kitāb al-Anwāʾ (9th century) listed twenty-four books on this subject written mostly between early eighth and tenth century. The only completely preserved text is that of Ibn Qutaybah, but later scholars had quoted many of the earlier texts. One of the most significant works that recorded the indigenous Arab star names is the Book of the stars written in ~ 964 AD by the prominent astronomer: al-Ṣūfī, where he identified the indigenous Arab star names with the respective Ptolemaic stars of the Greek constellations.

Al-Miġzal asterism in Cygnus. Photo by Khalid al-Ajaji taken on October 2016, the time of the identification of the name and its stars. (CC BY Khalid AlAjaji 2026).

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  Bedouin shepherdess spinning. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Digital ID: matpc 03790 https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/matpc.03790 Original image on loc.gov

Etymology

al-Miġzal (Arabic: المِغْزَل)is derived from the Arabic root (غزل), referring to a wool spindle, and ultimately from the verb “أُغْزِلَ,” meaning “to be twisted and rotated”.

Sources and Identification

The name comes from local oral tradition, recorded by Khalid al-Ajaji in October 2016 during a star-gazing session in the dunes of Ṯuwayrāt in the al-Zulfī region, northwest of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The identification was made directly at the time, when the informant pointed to the cross-shaped stars of Cygnus, visible from shortly after sunset until after midnight.

The research is documented and published in Stellarium software, available as a public dataset in the Stellarium GitHub Repository and the description by Khalid AlAjaji is also published in paper form in the conference proceedings Hoffmann and Wolfschmidt (eds. 2022). In Stellarium it is written (by Khalid AlAjaji):

The Wool Spindle: The cross-shaped arrangement of α Cyg (Deneb), ε Cyg (Gienah), γ Cyg (Sadr), δ Cyg, and β1+β2 Cyg (Albireo). This comes from oral tradition in Zulfi, central Saudi Arabia [#1].

Stars Identification

The asterism of al-Miġzal is formed by the stars α, γ, β Cyg and ε, γ, δ Cyg.

The identification is considered secure, as the narrator of the name personally indicated these stars when describing al-Miġzal.

IAU Working Group Star Names

In 2026, the name al-Miġzal (or any spelling variant) was suggested as a star name in the area that is covered by the historical asterism. It is suggested to be used for η Cyg.

Weblinks

• Stellarium https://stellarium.org/