Star naming is a scam. So we built something else.

I’m Nick. I built this from a small office in Salinas, California, in 2026, after spending a few hours one night looking up “name a star for $20” sites and feeling vaguely insulted by all of them.

The pitch is always the same: pay us, we’ll “name” a star, and you get a paper certificate that looks like it was printed in 1998. None of it’s official. No astronomer recognizes it. Only the International Astronomical Union can officially name a celestial object, and they don’t sell it.

So star-naming sites are technically lying. They’re selling permanence they don’t deliver, attached to a star that thousands of other companies have also “named” and a certificate that no one will ever look at twice.

I wanted to make the version that doesn’t lie.

The Galactic Registry is a permanent, public, searchable archive of symbolic dedications, each tied to a real galaxy from the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Messier Catalog, or the New General Catalogue. When you claim a galaxy, it leaves the available pool — uniquely, forever — and your dedication becomes part of an archival record we maintain for as long as we’re alive.

The certificate that arrives at your door is printed on 300gsm archival cotton, hand-numbered, shipped worldwide in a rigid tube. The galaxy on it is real. You can point at the sky and say “that one,” and any astronomer with the coordinates can confirm it exists.

I think about it like a land registry, or a memorial plaque on a park bench. Nobody owns the bench. The registry says you’re the one who paid for the inscription. And it’s public. And it lasts.

People have used it for what I expected — weddings, memorials, baby announcements — and for what I didn’t. There’s a galaxy in our registry dedicated to a Roomba named Ferdinand who died on the stairs in 2025. Another to a parking-lot grudge from November. One marriage proposal. A few too many entries about ChatGPT subscriptions.

Galaxies are permanent. The registry is permanent. What you put on it is up to you.

— Nick Georgalos
Founder · Salinas, CA · 2026