A small constellation to the south of Crux,
the Southern Cross. Musca was introduced at the end of the 16th
century by Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman
from the stars they observed during the first Dutch expeditions
to the East Indies. It was first depicted by their fellow
Dutchman Petrus Plancius on his globe of 1598, but for some
reason he left it unnamed. In his catalogue of 1603 de Houtman
called it De Vlieghe, meaning fly. Bayer, also in 1603, showed
the insect on his plate of the 12 new southern constellations
in Uranometria but called it Apis, the Bee, an alternative title
that was widely used for two centuries. The Dutch historian
Elly Dekker believes that this alternative identification arose
because Bayer copied his southern constellations from globes
produced by Jodocus Hondius in 1600 and 1601, on which the
figure was left unnamed. Not knowing what it was meant to
depict, Bayer wrongly identified it as a bee, not a fly.
The Latin name Musca first appeared in 1603
on a globe by Willem Janszoon Blaeu, another Dutch cartographer
and rival to Plancius, who utilized data from the later
catalogue of Frederick de Houtman that was completed after
Keyser’s death. Plancius himself did not adopt a name for
the constellation until 1612, when he called it Muia, the Greek
for fly, on a globe produced that year. For a time it was known
as Musca Australis, when there was also a northern fly, Musca
Borealis, in the sky.
The brightest star of Musca is of third
magnitude. None of its stars are named, and there are no
legends about the fly.
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Musca, shown under its sometime alternative name of Apis, the bee (but looking more like a wasp), in the Uranographia of Johann Bode.
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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