Flies are nasty little nuisances, right?
They drag the world’s diseases on their feet.
Their eggs grow into maggots in our meet.
But here is a handsome small object:
It’s the pupa, or stage between larva (maggot) and adult, of a fly. I find it almost as beautiful as a monarch butterfly pupa. It’s called leatherjacket in England, but I must have found and painted this one in my South Carolina vegetable garden. The notes say that the time was September and the scale was x2.
I remember reading somewhere that human engineers, who have got as far as devising drones to spy on us, can only dream of inventing something that can slip under doors, alternate between hovering and darting, dodge swatters, and walk on ceilings.
To see the constellation called Musca, the Fly, you have to go farther south than South Carolina: it’s around declination -70°, under the Southern Cross. Pieter Plancius must have thought this group of five stars beautiful when he made it into a constellation in 1597. It straddles the 12h line of right ascension, so that one of its stars, the fly’s tail, I think, is off this detail from my map of the Ophiuchus-centered half of the celestial sphere.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
The southern polar region has a lot of obscure non entity constellations Dorado being one but we must forget the polar one itself Octantis.most books skip over Sigma Octantis as a way of finding the South Pole preferring an alignment of Alpha/Beta Centarui and Crux but you can just see Sigma Octantis and it’s about as bright as Uranus so near 4 grades of magnitude weaker than Polaris.
Sometimes on long bike rides or long drives I entertain myself with the challenge of recalling lists of items or objects from memory. I decided once to try to recall all 88 constellation names. The letter M is challenging for a northern hemisphere observer, with Monoceros being the only one north of the celestial equator. Microscopium, Mensa, and your subject today, Musca, are tough ones to recall!
And Mensa, the Table, scores you two Ms: its original name was Mons Mensae, the Mountain of the Table.
You’d have to be way south of South Carolina to see Musca probably somewhere like El Salvador.i remember looking at it using my 8×25 monocular from the Old Quarentine Station at Manly a sort of suburb of Sydney and surprising dark considering the proximity to Australia’s biggest city.i vaguely remember looking at some nice open and globular clusters in it after I’d tackled 47 Tucana, the SMC and LMC but with hindsight I think that I was looking at Ara ,Pavo,Norma or Triangulum Australe as I can only see one globular in Musca and it’s just under 8th magnitude.Looks like I can rule out Apus and Mensa too nowt in them.i wonder when I’ll get to see the south celestial region again? living in north east England I can’t even see the Scorpions tail although the claws and Antares show well.