SkyEye

The Slug

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. Limax is one of John Hill’s creations. He describes it as "composed of certain conspicuous unformed stars near the foot of Orion, and under the Eridanus. It is a constellation of small extent, and contains only a few stars; but some of these are very considerable and bright ones....The conspicuous stars, of which the constellation Limax is composed, are nine."