Alpha Muscae
Alpha Muscae (α Muscae, α Mus) is a star in the southern circumpolar constellation of Musca. With an apparent visual magnitude of +2.7, it is the brightest star in the constellation. The distance to this star has been determined using parallax measurements, giving an estimate of about from Earth.
Musca
Musca was one of the 12 constellations established by the Dutch astronomer Petrus Plancius from the observations of the southern sky by the Dutch explorers Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, who had sailed on the first Dutch trading expedition, known as the "Eerste Schipvaart", to the East Indies. De Houtman included it in his southern star catalogue in 1598 under the Dutch name "De Vlieghe", "The Fly". They assigned four stars to the constellation, with a star that would be later designated as Beta Muscae marking the head, Gamma the body, and Alpha and Delta the left and right wings, respectively. It first appeared on a 35-cm-diameter (14-in) celestial globe published in 1598 in Amsterdam by Plancius with Jodocus Hondius, though was unnamed. The first depiction of this constellation in a celestial atlas was in the German cartographer Johann Bayer's "Uranometria" of 1603, though Bayer termed it Apis— "the Bee", a name by which it was known for the next two centuries. A 1603 celestial globe by Willem Blaeu depicts it as providing nourishment for the nearby constellation Chamaeleon—its tongue trying to catch the insect.