SkyEye

The Pangolin

John Hill (c.1714–1775) was an eighteenth-century British botanist and natural philosopher. In 1754, he published an astronomy dictionary entitled Urania, or A Compleat View of the Heavens. (This is a year before Samuel Johnson's celebrated A Dictionary of the English Language.) Over the course of 650 pages he discussed or defined numerous astronomical terms, often including pithy comments about the subject matter. He also invented 15 new constellations of his own, each modestly introduced as a "constellation offered to the astronomical world". Given that he was offering up celestial eels and earthworms and slugs, it's not entirely certain that he was serious. Manis is one of John Hill’s creations and runs across Lacerta. He describes it as being "composed of a series of a very conspicuous unformed stars near the constellation Cepheus....The constellation is of considerable extent in the heavens, and comprehends a great many stars; some of these are very considerable, and were very ill counted before under the name of this, or that constellation....The conspicuous stars in the constellation Manis are twenty-one in number, and some of them are of very considerable magnitudes; they follow one another in a crooked series, and are very happily comprehended within and upon the out-lines of this figure."