Antlia the Air Pump – Spring Sky
The French
astronomer Abbe Nicolaus de la Caille (1713-1762) is frequently
encountered in connection with certain constellations in the southern
sky. He travelled to the Cape of Good Hope in 1750 to chart the
southern heavens and in 1763 produced a catalogue of over 10,000
stars which was published posthumously. In this list of stars he
introduced 14 new constellations to the sky, sadly they are all faint
and obscure groups and many of them represent what were at the time
modern instruments. Hence the air pump rather than a classical Greek
term.
There was originally
48 constellations the number has now increased to 88 many of these
modern constellations are made up of faint stars just to fill in the
gaps between the main constellations. Many do have modern sounding
names.
The air pump was
created to honour Robert Boyle’s invention of the air pump around
1660.
Antlia can be seen
very low in the sky during spring evenings however there are no
bright stars in the constellation, you would need a very clear
southern horizon and a very clear sky to be in with a chance of
seeing any stars in Antlia.
The brightest alpha is at mag 4.2 and has a spectrum of K4 giant star
its surface temperature is around 3,800 degrees much cooler than our
Sun and lies about 370 light years away. Even from the southern
hemisphere where is is naturally much higher in the sky there is
little to remark about Antlia.
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