Microscopium

Origin

Microscopium is a faint minor constellation in the southern hemisphere sky. It is one of twelve IAU constellations created by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1751. Lacille cataloged ten thousand stars in the southern hemisphere during a voyage and sabbatical at the Cape of Good Hope from 1750 to 1754. From these stars de Lacaille devised many new constellations which honored the Age of Enlightenment. The constellation was first introduced as the French ‘le Microscope’ and was later latinised to Microscopium by 1763.

Bright Stars

The brightest star in Microscopium is Gamma Microscopii with an apparent brightness of 4.68, which is too faint to be observed through city-level light pollution. Gamma Microscopii is a yellow giant star which likely passed between 1.14 & 3.45 light-years from the Sun approximately 3.9 million years ago; this close encounter might have disturbed the Oort Cloud of the Solar System.

Within Microscopium there are only 43 stars that are bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, all of which are fainter than magnitude 4.5, making them difficult to see against light pollution.

Photo of the constellation Microscopium produced by NOIRLab in collaboration with Eckhard Slawik, a German astrophotographer. The annotations are from a standardized set of 88 western IAU constellations and stick figures from Sky & Telescope. Please find here a non-annotated version of the image.

Credit: E. Slawik/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Zamani