SkyEye

The Leech

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. Hirudo is one of John Hill’s creations. He describes it as being "composed of a series of conspicuous unformed stars over the head of Orion....It is a small constellation; but in proportion to the little space that it occupies in the heavens it contains a considerable number of stars. It is represented under the figure of that animal, not stretched out at length, but in its ordinary position bent, and with the head directed back again toward the tail."