14 Dec 2017

Were Fornax a vapid movie star rather than a constellation, I suspect it might make the same off-beam statement that movie stars make when they want to set some story straight in the press: “It’s an incorrect fact about me, and it’s all over the place”.

Fornax’s incorrect fact that is all over the place concerns the origin of its name. As we all know, the constellation was introduced by the French astronomer, Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, after his trip to the Cape of Good Hope to observe the southern stars in 1751–52. Lacaille originally called it Le Fourneau on his 1756 planisphere and depicted it as a chemist’s furnace used for distillation (as you can see, it consisted of a retort [a flask with a long neck] in which chemicals were heated over a fire, and a receiver to collect the products). The constellation’s name was Latinized to Fornax Chimiae on the second edition of Lacaille’s planisphere that was published in 1763 in Coelum Australe Stelliferum.

Thus far… correct facts. Then comes the incorrect fact that one sees all over the place – “Lacaille named this constellation in honour of his good friend Antoine Lavoisier, a French scientist and the father of modern chemistry”.

Not so.

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was born in 1743, and thus was only 13 years old when Lacaille’s chart of the southern constellations was first published. And indeed was only 19 years old when Lacaille’s short life ended in 1762.

In actual fact, Lavoisier’s connection was due to Johann Bode who reinvented the constellation nearly half a century later in his Uranographia atlas of 1801. Bode based his depiction of Fornax on Lavoisier’s diagram of his experiment to decompose water into its constituents of hydrogen and oxygen, as published in Traité élémentaire de chimie (Elements of Chemistry, 1789). As part of his reinvention, Bode also renamed the constellation Apparatus Chemicus, although most astronomers continued to use Lacaille’s original name. (In 1845 the English astronomer Francis Baily shortened its name to Fornax in his British Association Catalogue, acting on a suggestion by John Herschel that all Lacaille’s two-word names for constellations should be reduced to one. It has been known as Fornax ever since.)

 

He established the law of conservation of mass; determined that combustion and respiration are caused by chemical reactions with what he named “oxygen”; helped systematize chemical nomenclature; wrote the first modern textbook on chemistry, along with the French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace, he established that water was a compound and not an element; he discovered that sulfur is an element and that diamond is a form of carbon; among a host of other accomplishments.

Lavoisier was the son of a wealthy Parisian lawyer, and completed a law degree in accordance with family wishes. His real interest, however, was in science, which he pursued with passion while leading a full public life. On the basis of his earliest scientific work, mostly in geology, he was elected in 1768 – at the early age of 25 – to the Academy of Sciences, France’s most elite scientific society. A political and social liberal, Lavoisier took an active part in the events leading to the French Revolution, and in its early years he drew up plans and reports advocating many reforms, including the establishment of the metric system of weights and measures. Despite his eminence and his services to science and France, he came under attack as a former farmer-general of taxes and was guillotined in 1794.

How wonderful of Bode to have written this brilliant scientist’s name in the stars!

I have included observations of two of my favourite Fornax objects.

 

 

Observations

16″ f4.5 Dobs; 130x, 228x and 333x