Polophylax (

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

: ''guardian of the celestial outh

pole Pole may refer to: Astronomy *Celestial pole, the projection of the planet Earth's axis of rotation onto the celestial sphere; also applies to the axis of rotation of other planets *Pole star, a visible star that is approximately aligned with the ...

'') was a southern constellation that lay where

Tucana Tucana (The Toucan) is a constellation of stars in the southern sky, named after the toucan, a South American bird. It is one of twelve constellations conceived in the late sixteenth century by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter D ...

and Grus now are. It was introduced by

Petrus Plancius Petrus Plancius (; 1552 – 15 May 1622) was a Dutch-Flemish astronomer, cartographer and clergyman. He was born as Pieter Platevoet in Dranouter, now in Heuvelland, West Flanders. He studied theology in Germany and England. At the age of 24 he ...

in the small celestial planispheres on his large wall map of 1592. It is also shown on his smaller world map of 1594 and on world maps copied from Plancius. It was superseded by the twelve constellations which

formed in late 1597 or early 1598 from the southern star observations of Pieter Dircksz Keyser and Frederik de Houtman.

References

Former constellations {{former-constellation-stub