SkyEye

The Sea Horse

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. Hippocampus is one of John Hill’s creations and is described as "composed of certain and conspicuous stars under the feet of the constellation Taurus....The Hippocamp is placed between Orion, the Bull, the Whale, and the Eridanus. There is a vacant space between these in the centre of which are several loose stars, and this figure comprehends them all."