SkyEye

The Eel

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. Anguilla is one of John Hill’s creations. According to Hill, the constellation is comprised of "a number of unformed stars, over the heads of Capricorn and Sagittary. It is an asterism of considerable extent, and, in proportion to the space that is occupies in the heavens, is not ill furnished with stars....The conspicuous stars in this constellation are thirty-seven, and several of them are very large and bright ones; in general they are so placed as to mark the figure, and make it very distinguishable in its whole course." The accompanying sky map is based on Hill's rather vague description of the beast. The head of the eel, in Scutum, seems to overlap with another of his constellations, Pinna Marina. Perhaps the eel is eating the limpet.