Apus is a small constellation in the southern sky. It represents a bird- of-paradise, and its name (from Greek for "without feet") was chosen because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet. First depicted on a celestial globe by Petrus Plancius in 1598, it was charted on a star atlas by Johann Bayer in his 1603 Uranometria (pictured). The French explorer and astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille charted the brighter stars and gave them Bayer designations in 1756. The five brightest stars are all reddish in hue. Shading the others at apparent magnitude 3.8 is Alpha Apodis, an orange giant that has around 48 times the diameter and 928 times the luminosity of the Sun. Marginally fainter is Gamma Apodis, another ageing giant star. Delta Apodis is a double star, the two components of which are 103 arcseconds apart and visible with the naked eye. Two star systems have been found to have planets.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apus
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1859:
The French Navy captured the Citadel of Saigon, a fortress that was manned by 1,000 Nguyễn dynasty soldiers, en route to conquering Saigon and other regions of southern Vietnam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_of_Saigon
1904:
Italian composer Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly (Geraldine Farrar in the title role pictured) premiered at La Scala in Milan, generating negative reviews that forced him to rewrite the opera. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madama_Butterfly
1974:
A U.S. Army soldier stole a Bell UH-1 helicopter and landed it on the White House South Lawn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_White_House_helicopter_incident
2006:
A massive landslide in the Philippine province of Southern Leyte killed over 1,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Southern_Leyte_mudslide
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
hobbyist: A person who is interested in an activity or a subject as a hobby. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hobbyist
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
Nature is not merely present, but is implanted within things, distant from none; naught is distant from her except the false, and that which existed never and nowhere — nullity. And while the outer face of things changeth so greatly, there flourisheth the origin of being more intimately within all things than they themselves. The fount of all kinds, Mind, God, Being, One, Truth, Destiny, Reason, Order. --Giordano Bruno https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno