SkyEye

The Star-Gazer Fish

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. Uranoscopus is one of John Hill’s creations and is located near Gemini and Auriga. According to Hill, "The constellation is of considerable extent, and, in proportion to the space it occupies in the heavens, is not ill furnished with stars. These are happily enough disposed to represent the figure, and the constellation is in this the more marked, that it takes in all of the visible stars in that part of the space which is occupies; and without any forcing of the out-line, does not leave one out any where....The conspicuous stars in the constellation Uranscope are seventeen, and of these there are several very considerable...."