SkyEye

The Long-Legged Spider

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. Aranea is one of John Hill’s creations and is located near Virgo, just south of the first-magnitude star Spica. According to Hill, the constellation is "composed of a cluster of unformed and very conspicuous stars near the sign Virgo....It is a little constellation, but for the space is occupies is not ill provided with stars, and they are happily disposed to answer to the principal parts of the figure; it is represented in a posture of walking, raised from the grounds by its long legs, and marching from the constellation Virgo toward the lower part of that of Hydra."