The Path (Sort-of) Ascends

When we plot out the ascending path, our nice expected spiral pattern sort of goes away at the beginning. Part of our problem may be with two of the first points - "Cephei" and "Ursa Minoris". To specify a star in the Bayer designation, you need a Greek letter to pick out which star in the constellation you want. Ursa Minor has a special star, Polaris, sometimes included in the constellation - and of course one Cephei star stands out as being special as the canonical "Cepheid Variable" - but those choices don't especially work out. 

I have added the 1 through 11 count to show order, so you don't have to refer to the path list (although it might help to print it out.)

A possible clue is; when you use the actual, physical nautical almanac you can work with the 57 "normal" navigation stars, whose data is listed in the daily pages - OR - you can work with the heavy-duty, industrial strength long star list (173 stars!) that is set up later in the almanac.

On the previous descending path, you can look up the first eight stars on the daily pages, but you need the long star list to do the last three. Several of the ascending path stars need the long star list, sprinkled throughout that path list.

Coming back to our Cephei/UMi problem - when you look at the nautical almanac long star list format, you will find the list spread across 6 pages, with 2 pages each listing the data for 1/3 of the star list. The first set starts with: Gamma Cephei, the second set starts with: Gamma Ursa Minoris, and the third set starts with: Alpha Geminorum - otherwise known as - Castor! I will take that as our clue, for now ...

Incidentally, you can see how the nautical almanac solves an overrun problem with the 'Beta Librae' entry here. Several of the entries are '60.x', while the last two are '59.9'. First time I noticed an occurrence of their solution!

While I like the righteousness of this logic, the plot does not suggest anything except a vague spiral formed by some of the points. Perhaps this is what the "moments of unification" part of the blank verse clue means, that we have to put all the points together to have a pattern come out. We're getting there.