Indus
One of the 88 official IAU constellations. The southern constellation was created by Dutch explorers in late 1597 (or early 1598) and added to Western star globes and charts, starting with Plancius's globe of 1598 followed by Bayer's Uranometria atlas of 1603.
History and Etymology
The constellation was defined by the Dutch in the 1590s. The star catalogue was published by de Houtman in Dutch, although Plancius and Bayer had already depicted the constellations on globes.
The southern star catalog by de Houtman[1] and Keyser was published by de Houtman in 1603 as an appendix to a dictionary of the Malaysian (and other) language(s). This star catalog was written in Dutch (with later translations to French,[2] English[3][4] and Spanish[5]). This printed catalogue of 1603 was made from observations collected by de Houtman on his second voyage (1598-1602) and during the two-year period when he was held as a hostage by the Sultan of Aceh on Northern Sumatra. At that time, de Houtman worked for W.J. Blaeu, a Plancius competitor, who used the data on his celestial globe of 1603.
Modern Star Names
weblinks
- Ridpath, Ian, “Star Tales: online edition”.
References
- ↑ Frederik de Houtman (1603) Star Catalogue concerning the Indian Magpie
- ↑ Marre, Aristide, “Catalogue des étoiles circumpolaires australes observées dans l'Ile de Sumatra”, Bulletin sciences mathématiques et astronomiques, 1 (1881), 336–352 [ADS link].
- ↑ Knobel, Edward Ball, “On Frederick de Houtman's catalogue of southern stars, and the origin of the southern constellations”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 77 (1917), 414–432 [doi link / ADS link].
- ↑ Knobel, Edward Ball, “Note on the paper 'On Frederick de Houtman's catalogue of southern stars, and the origin of the southern constellations' ", Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 77 (1917), 580 [doi link / ADS link].
- ↑ Selga, Miguel, "Un catálogo antiguo de estrellas australes", Revista de la Sociedad Astronómica de España y América, 8 (1918), 84-90 & 9 (1919), 11, 44-46 & 62-63 [online link(?)].
