Musca

About Musca in brief

Musca is a small constellation in the deep southern sky. It first appeared on a 35-cm-diameter celestial globe published in 1598 in Amsterdam by Plancius with 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 for 200 years. Musca remains below the horizon for most Northern Hemisphere observers. Many of the constellation’s brighter stars are members of the Scorpius–Centaurus Association, a loose group of hot blue-white stars that appears to share a common origin and motion across the Milky Way. The Wardaman people of the Northern Territory in Australia perceived the main stars of Musca as a ceremonial boomerang, part of the Central Arena that depicts lightning creation beings. It is the only official constellation depicting an insect. The official boundaries were set by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte in 1930, defined by six segments of six stars. Covering 138 square degrees and 0. 335% of the sky, it ranks 77th of the 88th constellations in size in the International Astronomical Union’s list of the top 100 constellationals. The constellation also contains two cepheid variables visible to the naked eye. Theta Muscae is a triple star system, the brightest member of which is a Wolf–Rayet star, and HD 100546, a blue- white Herbig AeBe star that is surrounded by a complex debris disk containing a large planet or brown dwarf and possible protoplanet.

Two further star systems have been found to have planets, including Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Zeta2 and EtaMuscae, as well as HD100546, which has two planets. The stars of the Musca, along with Fomalhaut, Pavonis, Alpha and Beta Gruonis, were all claimed by the Arrernte and Luritja camps, all of which were all bordered by the Crux to the north, Carina to the south, Apinus and Circinus to the east and northeast, and Circus and Centaurus to the northeast. The names Musca Australis, the Southern Fly—Australis, and Musca la Mouche were used by the French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in the 1756 version of his planisphere of the southern skies. The name Musca was adopted by the International astronomical Union in 1922, and is now used as the official name for the constellation by the Astronomers of the world. It has been known as Musca for more than two centuries, but the name was first used in the 16th century by Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, who sailed on the first Dutch trading expedition, known as the Eerste Schipvaart, to the East Indies. A 1603 celestial globe by Willem Blaeu depicts it as providing nourishment for the nearby constellation Chamaeleon—its tongue trying to catch the insect.