The Southern Milky Way and south celestial pole - The Octant constellation houses the southern...

The Southern Milky Way and south celestial pole - The Octant constellation houses the southern Celestial pole. See annotee image a - cst98 - 00005 to identify the different constellations present in the image. This part of the sky was mostly uncharted by Europeans until the 17th and 18th centuries, so many of the constellations in the southern (lower) half of the image are relatively modern constructions without mythlogical connotations. Octans, the Octant (a forerunner of the sextant) is an Enlightenment - period instrument whose outline was constructed on the sky by the vivid imagination of the Abbe Lacaille. The constellation is quite large but totally undistinguished. Its only notable feature is the South Celestial Pole, with is marked (within a degree or so) by the faint star s Octantis. Apus, the Bird of Paradise, first appeared in the star charts of the German astronomer Johann Bayer in 1603. It contains no named stars. Chameleon, a type of lizard. The stars here are even fainter than those in Apus. Mensa, the constellation was invented by de Lacaille to commemorate his sojourn at the Cape of Good Hope in the 1750s. The original name was Mons Mensa, Latin for Table Mountain. Its northern border crosses part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, possibly reminding Lacaille of the recurrent cloud over the mountain as seen from Cape Town. Musca, the Fly, is another undistinguished constellation that first appeared on Bayer's star charts in 1603