शूल (?) Śūla

unidentified red star reported south of Canopus · — · far southern sky

individual staridentification disputedattestations 1

Attestations

Later siddhāntas & al-Bīrūnī · 1030 CE, reporting Śrīpāla of Multan

No Sanskrit text: al-Bīrūnī wrote in Arabic, and the passage survives here only in Sachau's English.

So Śrīpāla says that the people of Multan see in summer time a red star a little below the meridian of Canopus, which they call Sūla, i.e. the beam of crucifixion, and that the Hindus consider it as unlucky. Therefore, when the moon stands in the station Pūrvabhādrapada, the Hindus do not travel towards the south, because this star stands in the south. — E. Sachau (1910)

A star otherwise unrecorded in the Sanskrit tradition, preserved only because al-Bīrūnī heard of it from Śrīpāla, a scholar of Multan contemporary with him. Data: red; seen in summer; a little BELOW the meridian of Canopus; considered unlucky; standing in the south when the moon is in Pūrvabhādrapadā, on which account Hindus avoided southward travel then. Sachau translates the name as 'the beam of crucifixion', pointing to Sanskrit śūla ('stake, impaling-post') — but the Devanagari above is a reconstruction from Sachau's transliteration of an Arabic-script word and is NOT attested in any Sanskrit source; Sachau himself declines to identify the star. The identification is genuinely open: nothing prominent, red and south of Canopus is visible from Multan (30°12'N), so either the report is garbled, or 'below the meridian of Canopus' means something other than 'further south', or the object was transient.

Al-Bīrūnī, India ch. XXII (Sachau 1910, vol. 1, p. 240; note at vol. 2, p. 309) · text · translation