#3. Have a star named after me

Let's face it. There's really no way that a star will be named after you unless you made a breakthrough discovery in Science, especially in Astronomy and everything Science related. For every star the science community finds, they designate a name using an international naming standard. If they wish to name a star, the higher echelons that handle these things would have to vote on it. Here's an excerpt from an article I found at Universetoday.com:

The name of astronomical objects is managed by the International Astronomical Union. Names for moons, asteroids and other deep space objects are proposed at the IAU meetings and voted on. Even an astronomer who discovers a new object can only propose a name to the IAU; there's no guarantee they'll select it.

These companies that offer to sell stars are not actually allowed to name stars by the scientific community. Instead, what they're doing is accessing star catalogs created by astronomers, and then putting all of these stars into a database. If you "adopt a star" from one of these companies, all they're doing is updating their database with the name you've selected, and printing off a nice certificate. The name isn't given that official name.

Some of the more honorable companies will classify a real object, so you can take your coordinates and try to find the star for yourself, but others aren't so good. It's buyer beware.

Imagine there was a service that allowed you to "adopt a country". If you want, you can rename a country after yourself. You might start calling it by its new name, but the residents of that country aren't going to be changing their name.

The only benefit adopt a star services give is they help increase interest in space and astronomy. It helps people stop for a moment and consider the Universe around them, and maybe even seek out a telescope or observatory to learn more about astronomy. That's a good thing.

However, the closest thing you can do is to adopt a star. So I did. Pale Blue Dot Project is a website that is run by a non-profit and support scientific research group. Through them, you can adopt a star that is within the recently launched Kepler satellite's field of view between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations. What's interesting about this is that they are doing research to finding habitable planets in the more than 100,000 bright stars in this section of space. Monitoring the brightest stars, they are looking for any dip in the amount of light received by the telescope from any particular star, which could possibly be a planet passing by between the star and the light it is emitting towards the telescope as observed from Earth. For $10.00, you can adopt a star in this region of space. The money goes to the non-profit White Dwarf Research Corporation.

I just adopted a bright blue whitedwarf close to the Cygnus constellation. I chose this one because it is blue and it is facing the Aquarius constellation. You can check out the star I adopted here:
http://whitedwarf.org/palebluedot/sky/4671313.html

The link might ask you to install Google Sky plugin, which you should. After that, you can view my adopted star.

So I just scratched off #3 on my 101 things to do.

3. Have a star named after me

Update: If you guys don't want to install Google Sky plugin, here are pictures of where my adopted star is.

This region of space that is plotted into 42 rectangles are the 100,000+ stars within the Kepler Satellite's field of vision. That rectangle in the middle close to the Cygnus constellation is where my star is.

This is what you'll see as you zoom in from the link I gave above. The Red placeholders means they have been adopted. Green ones are still unclaimed.

That bright star is the star I adopted. This particular region is still quite empty.

I'm done.