This constellation, which lay just north of Aries, has a confusing history. It
was introduced on a globe of 1612 by the Dutchman Petrus Plancius under the
name Apes, the Bee. The German astronomer Jacob Bartsch changed the name to
Vespa, the Wasp, on his map of 1624. Johannes Hevelius renamed it Musca on his Firmamentum Sobiescianum atlas of 1690. It later became known as Musca Borealis to distinguish it from
the equivalent insect that already existed in the southern sky. Eventually,
though, the northern fly was swatted by astronomers.
To add to the confusion, the same stars were used by the Frenchman Ignace-Gaston
Pardies (1636–73) to form Lilium, the fleur-de-lis of France. This appeared in an atlas
entitled Globi coelestis in tabulas planas redacti descriptio published in 1674, the year after his death, but was a very short-lived addition
to the sky.
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Musca Borealis crawls across this chart from the Uranographia of Johann Bode.
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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