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Much of the southern sky wasn't visible to the ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Instead of representing the ancient myths, the constellations were invented long afterwards by European explorers and astronomers. Some of Abbe Lacaille's inventions are tributes to the arts.

Lacaille's skies – Arts

Table Mountain provides a dramatic backdrop for Cape Town, South Africa. Lacaille was inspired to devise one of his new constellations to honor the place where he carried out his observations.

The constellation Mensa includes the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This is actually a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, but it looks like a small cloud in the southern hemisphere night sky. In principle, Mensa would be a lovely constellation. But in practice, it's the dimmest constellation in the sky, so although you can see the LMC, you'd need a dark sky and a telescope to see the rest of the constellation.

There is an X-ray binary in the constellation Circinus, the drawing compass. It's called Circinus X-1. X-1 means it's the first X-ray source found in Circinus. The image is a composite made using data from X-ray, optical and radio telescopes. Each wavelength gives different information.

One of the elements of the binary is a neutron star, but no one knows what the other one is. A neutron star is the remnant of a giant star that ended its life in a supernova.