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Polophylax (Greek: guardian of the pole) was a southern constellation that lay where Tucana and Grus now are.
During the Renaissance several new constellations were created for recorded stars that were outside the boundaries of the existing Ptolemaic constellations. Polophylax was introduced (along with the constellation Columba) by Petrus Plancius in the small celestial planispheres on his large wall map of 1592. It is also shown on his smaller world map of 1594 and on world maps copied from Plancius.
It was superseded by the twelve constellations which Petrus Plancius formed in late 1597 or early 1598 from the southern star observations of Pieter Dircksz Keyser and Frederik de Houtman.
References
- Herlihy, Anna F. (2007), "Renaissance Star Charts" (PDF), The History of Cartography, Volume 3, The University of Chicago Press, p. 104, retrieved 2024-12-25
- Barentine, John C. (2016), "Polophylax", Uncharted Constellations: Asterisms, Single-Source and Rebrands, Springer Praxis Books, Springer, Cham, pp. 109–113, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-27619-9_12, ISBN 978-3-319-27619-9, retrieved 2023-08-04
- ^ Ridpath, Ian. "Polophylax". Star Tales. Retrieved 2023-08-04.
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