Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille

Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille was an abbe and a professor of mathematics, and in 1751 he took an observatory to Table Bay and spent two years working the southern sky from Cape Town. In that time he recorded positions for close to ten thousand stars, most of which had never been catalogued, using a small refractor on a quadrant and observing night after night through a hole in the roof of a hut he had built. He also measured an arc of the meridian in the Cape hinterland and, in coordination with an observer in Europe, made simultaneous observations of the moon and the planets to improve the value of their distances.

The catalogue is the reason the southern sky is mapped at all in the European tradition. Ptolemaic astronomy had been built from the Mediterranean and had never seen the region round the southern pole, and the constellations that navigators had sketched into it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were incomplete and inconsistent. Lacaille filled the gap systematically and added fourteen constellations of his own, and he also broke up the huge ancient figure of the ship Argo into a keel, a stern and a set of sails, which is why no constellation called Argo exists on a modern chart.

What he named them is the interesting part. The air pump, the sculptor chisel, the pair of compasses, the chemical furnace, the pendulum clock, the microscope, the set square, the octant, the painter easel, the mariner compass, the net, the sculptor studio, the telescope, and Table Mountain itself. Not one god, not one hero, not one animal from a story. Where the northern sky carries figures whose names travelled from Mesopotamia through Greece and were already ancient when they were written down, the far south was named in the eighteenth century by a man who filled it with the contents of a workshop.

The consequence for this atlas is worth stating carefully. The far southern sky is the one large region of the celestial sphere that carries almost no mythology in the Western tradition, which is a fact about Europe and not about the sky. The peoples who had been living under those stars for tens of thousands of years had their own detailed accounts of them, and in Australia in particular the songlines associated with the Seven Sisters and the dark shapes read in the Milky Way are living tradition rather than survivals. Lacaille names sit on top of that, and the atlas holds both layers rather than treating the European chart as the map of an empty sky.