page_title: Caelum
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Caelum / History
caption_attribution_description: "Canis Major, Lepus, Columba Noachi &amp; Cela Sculptoris", plate 30 in Urania's Mirror, a set of celestial cards accompanied by A familiar treatise on astronomy ... by Jehoshaphat Aspin. London. Astronomical chart, 1 print on layered paper board&#160;: etching, hand-colored.
context_page_description: Caelum is a faint constellation in the southern sky, introduced in the 1750s by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille and counted among the 88 modern constellations. Its name means “chisel” in Latin, and it was formerly known as Caelum Scalptorium; It is a rare word, unrelated to the far more common Latin caelum, meaning “sky, heaven, atmosphere”. It is the eighth-smallest constellation, and subtends a solid angle of around 0.038 steradians, just less than that of Corona Australis.
  Due to its small size and location away from the plane of the Milky Way, Caelum is a rather barren constellation, with few objects of interest. The constellation's brightest star, Alpha Caeli, is only of magnitude 4.45, and only one other star, γ ¹ Caeli, is brighter than magnitude 5. Other notable objects in Caelum are RR Caeli, a binary star with one known planet approximately 20.13 parsecs away; X Caeli, a Delta Scuti variable that forms an optical double with γ ¹ Caeli; and HE0450-2958, a Seyfert galaxy that at first appeared as just a jet, with no host galaxy visible.
context_section_description: Caelum was incepted as one of fourteen southern constellations in the 18th century by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, a French astronomer and celebrater of the Age of Enlightenment.
  It retains its name Burin among French speakers, latinized in his catalogue of 1763 as Caelum Sculptoris (“Engraver's Chisel”).
  Francis Baily shortened this name to Caelum, as suggested by John Herschel. In Lacaille's original chart, it was shown as a pair of engraver's tools: a standard burin and more specific shape-forming échoppe tied by a ribbon, but came to be ascribed a simple chisel. Johann Elert Bode stated the name as plural with a singular possessor, Caela Scalptoris – in German (die ) Grabstichel (“the Engraver’s Chisels”) – but this did not stick.
   
caption: Seen as “Cela Sculptoris” in the lower right of this 1825 star chart from Urania's Mirror
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