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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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