SkyEye

The Microscope

French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (1713–1762) travelled to South Africa in the mid-eighteenth century where he constructed an observatory and spent two years observing the southern skies. Not only did he catalogue nearly 10,000 southern stars, he also surveyed 42 'nebulous' objects and devised over a dozen new constellations. Originally named Le Microscope, this faint southern hemisphere constellation was later Latinised to Microscopium. This constellation is one of a number of 'modern' constellations named after scientific instruments.