- 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.
- Uruguay (Wikipedia)
Uruguay (/ˈjʊərəɡwaɪ/ YOOR-ə-gwy, Spanish: [uɾuˈɣwaj]), officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay (Spanish: República Oriental del Uruguay), is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast, while bordering the Río de la Plata to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast. It is part of the Southern Cone region of South America. Uruguay covers an area of approximately 176,215 square kilometres (68,037 sq mi) and has a population of around 3.4 million, of whom nearly 2 million live in the metropolitan area of its capital and largest city, Montevideo.
