en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_designation
1 correction found
Bayer catalogued only a few stars too far south to be seen from Germany, but later astronomers (including Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille and Benjamin Apthorp Gould) supplemented Bayer's catalog with entries for southern constellations.
Bayer’s Uranometria did not include only “a few” far-southern stars: it included a dedicated southern-sky plate with 12 new southern constellations and more than 1,200 stars overall.
Full reasoning
This sentence substantially understates how much southern-sky material Bayer included.
Reliable descriptions of Uranometria say it was the first atlas to cover the entire celestial sphere. Its 49th chart introduced 12 new constellations in the deep southern sky, and the atlas listed over 1,200 stars in total. The southern star positions on that plate were taken from the catalogue of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser.
The Linda Hall Library’s overview of Bayer likewise says plate 49 included all 12 of the newly described southern constellations, based on observations by Frederick de Houtman and Pieter Keyser.
So Bayer did not catalogue only “a few” stars too far south to be seen from Germany. He included a substantial southern-sky component in Uranometria; later astronomers certainly expanded southern Bayer-style designations, but Bayer’s own atlas already went well beyond just a few such stars.
2 sources
- Uranometria - Wikipedia
It was the first atlas to cover the entire celestial sphere. The 49th chart introduces 12 new constellations in the deep southern sky... The stars listed in Uranometria total over 1,200... Bayer took the southern star positions and constellation names for the 49th plate from the catalog of Dutch navigator Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser.
- Johann Bayer - The Linda Hall
Plate 49 of Bayer's Uranometria requires some explanation... Frederick de Houtman and Pieter Keyser... record[ed] the positions of the southern stars... Plancius put them on a star globe, and Bayer included all 12 on a single plate in his atlas.