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PUPPIS
The Poop Deck
Argo Navis - Johannes Hevelius
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Since ancient times, a large portion of the southern sky was one large constellation. It was called Argo Navis, and represented the stern section of the Argos, the legendary ship that transported Jason and the Argonauts on their quest to find the Golden Fleece. The Hevelius depiction above is reversed, as if looking down from space at the outside of a globe or spherical shell of stars that surrounded Earth, as the ancients believed.
In 1751, during his famous expedition to South Africa to chart the southern skies, French astronomer Nicolas Lacaille decided the ancient constellation was just too large and unwieldy. There were too many stars, too many other, mysterious objects. The area needed to be divided into smaller, more manageable constellations. But the Argo Navis was such a majestic, powerful image in the sky! It couldn't simply be scrapped, and replaced by new constellations. So Lacaille compromised, and left the ancient image in the sky, with all its grand mythological romance, and adventure, and tradition, and simply divided the figure into three parts: Puppis, the poop deck, Vela, the sail, and Carina, the keel.
I have taken the outrageous liberty of tracing the new constellations over the magnificent artwork of Johann Bayer's 1603 Uranometria above, to help show their ancient origins. Puppis is Latin for poop deck, the traditional name for the very stern of a ship. Although a remnant of its former self, Puppis is still a large constellation, straddling the entire width of the Milky Way, making it a virtual treasure trove of star clusters and nebulae. Look for Puppis sandwiched between the two brightest stars in the sky, Sirius above and Canopus below.
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