Stars on flags

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I recently did a review of national and subnational flags with respect to the stars on them. I figure I should not waste that effort, so I’m sharing some of the results.

I looked at two things: 1) number of stars and 2) how many points the stars had.

Lots of flags had one through five stars. I’m afraid I’m not feeling energetic enough to actually count the number of flags in each category. The only thing interesting about this is that there were more with five than with three or four. Not sure why five was a prefered number, although there are a number of southern hemisphere flags with the Southern Cross. I think there were more 5-star Crosses than 4-star ones.

All the counts up through 27 were represented by at least one flag. Brazil was the one with 27 stars. 29, 20, 33, 34, 38 were also represented by at least one flag. The flag with the most stars was that of Missouri which has 61. Next highest is 50, the US flag, of course, but also that of Leyte (province in the Philippines).


If you look closely at the seal, you’ll see a circle around the cross. That circle is made up of 50 stars. (You can get a better view of it at the Wikipedia image) BTW, subnational flags that just have the state or provincial seal on a plain background are quite common. US states are not unusual for having so many of them.

Five pointed stars were so common, I didn’t even record which flags had them, much less count them.

There were no three pointed stars among the national-subantional flags, although a google search turned up a yacht club with a three-pointed star on its flag.

There were four flags with four-pointed flags: Aruba, Baikonur (Kazakhstan), Khovd (Mongolia), Catanduanes (Philippines).

Six pointed stars were fairly common. Among national flags, only Israel and Burundi have them, but they were much more common among subnational flags.

Seven-pointed stars are found on Australia’s flag as well as three Australian subnationals. Also Southern Savonia (Finland) has a 7-pointed star on its flag.

Azerbaijan’s flag has an eight-pointed star, as does the new Minnesota flag. Seven other subnational flags also have eight-pointed stars.

Sarawak (Malaysia) and Herzegovina-Neretva Canton (B&H) have nine-pointed stars on their flags. The only ten-pointed star I found was on that of District of Somió (Asturias, Spain), which is a sub-subnational unit.

Puntarenas (Costa Rica) has the only 11-pointed star; Nauru, Cordillera (Paraguay), Durazno (Uruguay) have twelve pointed stars. Durazno’s flag also has 18 6-pointed stars.

The star with the most points is on Marshall Islands’ flag with 24; runner up is Indonesia’s with a 14-pointed star.

2

Since the sun is a star we should count the Japanse flag that has no points as being the least. Now, let the arguments begin.

3

That only applies in physics. In graphical arts, a sun is a distinct object from a star. And that’s how a I counted. If I wasn’t sure which it was, I checked FotW, which usually has any official description of the flags.

4

Very interesting post about a topic I never considered before. I give it four stars.

5

Just noticed an error there. That 20 should be 30. Which are found on the Magdalena (Colombia) flag.

6

You win the thread!

Seriously, thank you @dtilque for sharing an interesting result on an unexpected topic.

7

Interesting. Isn’t a 3-pointed star a triangle? Or is it a circular center with 3 rays? Or a triquetra?

8

ETA that was meant to be a link to a picture of a three pointed star, but it’s also “a gallery of flags arranged with one or more stars as a feature of their design. (For flags depicting actual stars in the sky, see gallery of astronomical flags.)”

9

Maybe, but I’d sure be inclined to count a 24-pointed star as a sun shape. If I were describing the Japanese flag purely in terms of shapes, I’d call that a circle, not a sun.

How many flags have stars with different numbers of points? You pointed out Durazno’s with one large twelve-pointed and 18 six-pointed, and off the top of my head, Australia has mostly seven-pointed but one five-pointed (probably mostly because that one is smaller).

(I just checked, and New Zealand’s flag, despite being very similar to Australia’s, is all five-points, as is Alaska’s, even though it does have different sizes of stars)

10

If you had not limited yourself to national and subnational, but had also included supranational organisations, I would have given you NATO:

Two pointed and one pointed stars would look nice.

11

If you count historic flags, the US had 28-38 all covered, skipped 39-42, covered 43-46, skipped 47, and covered 48-50.

12

The NATO example gets real close to questioning what the definition of “star” is for these purposes. Beyond simply “a shape with points on it.”

To me that is much more of a stylized cross than it is a type of star. I don’t know the actual vexological derivation of the symbol but I see it as probably originating as a flavor of compass rose.

13

That definitely looks like a compass rose to me, but I’d say that compass roses, even four-pointed ones, are inherently closer to stars than to crosses. You will often see compass roses with 8 or even 16 points, but you’ll never see a compass rose with squared-off arms.

14

Agreed.

Here’s an interesting similar example. This is the logo of the Polestar line of EVs, a division of Volvo:

Is the logo representing a compass rose, a star, or just directionality, of which North (where Polaris is seen) is the privileged direction in most of the world? Most likely it’s all of the above.

15

But I’m not going by how it looks, but rather how it’s described in the official description. OK, I didn’t actually check every official description, just those that I had doubts about. And I did check those of Marshall Islands and Indonesia.

There’s a number of other flags that copy Australia’s 7-point and 5-point Southern Cross. Otherwise I didn’t see any.

16

The Philippines has a sun with 8 points and the 5 point stars. But then again the OP has removed the sun from consideration.

17

And now I’m wondering how many flags have stars representing actual stars, as opposed to just stars as abstract symbols that represent something completely non-astronomical. There are all of the Southern Cross flags and the Alaska flag, and apparently there was an Irish nationalist flag that used the Plough asterism (the same stars as the Big Dipper, just interpreted differently).

Though of course, this gets into some gray areas. I can imagine a flag with one star identifying it in the description as “The North Star of <insert virtue>, which guides all of our actions”, or something like that.

Oh, and looking up the Missouri flag with 61 stars, wow, that’s way too busy. The flag consists of the state seal on a striped background, surrounded by a ring of 24 stars since Missouri was the 24th state. But the state seal itself includes a cluster of 24 stars, for the same reason, which seems rather redundant. And the state seal also includes a copy of the US seal in its entirety, in miniature, and that includes 13 stars. It sounds like the designers just said “Include the seal”, without bothering to look up what the seal actually was.

While we’re at it, the seal also includes both a bear as part of the crest and two bears as supporters, and the official description identifies all three bears as grizzlies, even though there aren’t actually any grizzlies in the state.

18

That is a compass rose, not a star

19

Brazil has several constellations, including the Southern Cross. The astronomical details are given here:
https://www.fotw.info/flags/br_astro.html

Note that each star represents a specific Brazilian state.

The star on Minnesota’s new flag represents the North Star. But I agree that this isn’t really an astronomical representation. You need several stars making up an asterism.

20

So you’re saying it’s seals all the way down? :wink: Although I bet there are turtles on the bottom of that river where all the grizzlies hunt the famous Missouri salmon.


It sure is: