- Nikolai Patrushev (Wikipedia)
Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev (Russian: Никола́й Плато́нович Па́трушев; born 11 July 1951) is a Russian politician, security officer and former intelligence officer who served as the secretary of the Security Council of Russia from 2008 to 2024. He previously served as the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) from 1999 to 2008. Belonging to the siloviki faction of president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, Patrushev is believed to be one of the closest advisors to Putin and a leading figure behind Russia’s national security affairs. He played a key role in the decisions to seize and then annex Crimea in 2014 and to invade Ukraine in 2022.
- 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.
