- Star Tales - Musca (ianridpath.com)
A small constellation to the south of Crux, the Southern Cross. Musca was one of the 12 southern constellations 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. The constellation arose because the seafarers saw chameleons eating flies during their stopover on Madagascar, and in the sky the fly lies next to the constellation Chamaeleon. These new southern constellations were first depicted by their fellow Dutchman Petrus Plancius on his globe of 1598, but for some reason he left the fly unnamed. In de Houtman’s catalogue of 1603, completed after Keyser’s death, it is called De Vlieghe, Dutch for fly.
- Musca (Wikipedia)
Musca (Latin for ‘“the fly”’) is a small constellation in the deep southern sky. It was one of 12 constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, and it first appeared on a celestial globe 35 cm (14 in) in diameter published in 1597 (or 1598) in Amsterdam by Plancius and Jodocus Hondius. The first depiction of this constellation in a celestial atlas was in Johann Bayer’s Uranometria of 1603. It was also known as Apis (Latin for ‘“the bee”’) for 200 years. Musca remains below the horizon for most Northern Hemisphere observers.
