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48-452: Octans was one of 14 constellations created by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille during his expedition to the Cape of Good Hope , and was originally named l’Octans de Reflexion (“the reflecting octant”) in 1752, after he had observed and catalogued almost 10,000 southern stars during a two-year stay at the Cape of Good Hope . He devised fourteen new constellations in uncharted regions of

96-504: A desire for political independence. In 1853, the Cape Colony became a British Crown colony with representative government. In 1854, the Cape of Good Hope elected its first parliament , on the basis of the multi-racial Cape Qualified Franchise . Cape residents qualified as voters based on a universal minimum level of property ownership, regardless of race. Executive power remaining completely in

144-644: A number of bitter, genocidal conflicts between the colonists and the Khoe-speaking indigenes , followed by the Xhosa , both of which they perceived as unwanted competitors for prime farmland. VOC traders imported thousands of slaves to the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch East Indies and other parts of Africa. By the end of the eighteenth century the Cape's population swelled to about 26,000 people of European descent and 30,000 slaves. In 1795, France occupied

192-421: A table of eclipses for 1800 years. Lalande said of him that, during a comparatively short life, he had made more observations and calculations than all the astronomers of his time put together. The quality of his work rivalled its quantity, while the disinterestedness and rectitude of his moral character earned him universal respect. On his return to Paris in 1754, following a diversion to Mauritius , Lacaille

240-547: A trading post and naval victualing station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Van Riebeeck's objective was to secure a harbour of refuge for VOC ships during the long voyages between Europe and Asia. Within about three decades, the Cape had become home to a large community of vrijlieden , also known as vrijburgers ('free citizens'), former VOC employees who settled in the colonies overseas after completing their service contracts. Vrijburgers were mostly married citizens who undertook to spend at least twenty years farming

288-438: Is no real mythology related to Octans, partially due to its faintness and relative recentness, but mostly because of its extreme southerly latitude. Octans is a generally inconspicuous constellation with only one star brighter than magnitude 4; its brightest member is Nu Octantis , a spectral class K1 III giant star with an apparent magnitude  3.73. It is 63.3 ± 0.8 light-years distant from Earth. Beta Octantis

336-481: Is the second brightest star in the constellation. Polaris Australis (Sigma Octantis) , the southern pole star , is a magnitude 5.4 star just over 1 degree away from the true south celestial pole. Its relative faintness means that it is not practical for navigation. BQ Octantis is a fainter, magnitude 6.82 star located much closer to the South Pole (at less than a degree) than Sigma. In addition to having

384-617: The 1820 Settlers . They also began to introduce the first rudimentary rights for the Cape's Black African population and, in 1834, abolished slavery ; however, the government proved unable to rein in settler violence against the San, which continued largely unabated as it had during the Dutch period. The resentment that the Boers felt against this social change, as well as the imposition of English language and culture , caused them to trek inland en masse. This

432-663: The British Empire , becoming self-governing in 1872. The colony was coextensive with the later Cape Province , stretching from the Atlantic coast inland and eastward along the southern coast, constituting about half of modern South Africa: the final eastern boundary, after several wars against the Xhosa , stood at the Fish River . In the north, the Orange River , natively known as the ǂNūǃarib (Black River) and subsequently called

480-602: The Cape , now nominally controlled by the Batavian Republic , was occupied again by the British after their victory in the Battle of Blaauwberg . The temporary peace between the UK and Napoleonic France had crumbled into open hostilities, whilst Napoleon had been strengthening his influence on the Batavian Republic (which Napoleon would subsequently abolish and directly administer later

528-545: The Collège de Lisieux and then theology at the Collège de Navarre . He was left destitute in 1731 by the death of his father, who had held a post in the household of the duchess of Vendôme. However, he was supported in his studies by the Duc de Bourbon , his father's former patron. After he graduated, he did not accept ordination as a priest but took deacon 's orders, becoming an Abbé . He concentrated thereafter on science, and, through

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576-570: The French Revolution . His desire to determine the distances of the planets trigonometrically, using the longest possible baseline, led him to propose, in 1750, an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope . This was officially sanctioned by Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière . There, he constructed an observatory on the shore of Table Bay with the support of the Dutch Governor Ryk Tulbagh . The primary result of his two-year stay

624-727: The Seven Provinces of the Dutch Republic , the mother country of the Dutch United East India Company . This prompted Great Britain to occupy the Cape Colony in 1795 as a way to better control the seas in order to stop any potential French attempt to reach India . The British sent a fleet of nine warships which anchored at Simon's Town and, following the defeat of the VOC militia at the Battle of Muizenberg , took control of

672-604: The Southern Celestial Hemisphere not visible from Europe. All but one honoured instruments that symbolised the Age of Enlightenment . It was part of his catalogue of the southern sky, the Coelum Australe Stelliferum , which was published posthumously in 1763. In Europe, it became more widely known as Octans Hadleianus , in honor of English mathematician John Hadley , who invented the octant in 1730. There

720-626: The Union of South Africa , then became the Cape Province , which existed even after 1961, when South Africa had become a republic, albeit, temporarily outside the Commonwealth of Nations (1961–94). The British colony was preceded by an earlier corporate colony that became an original Dutch colony of the same name , which was established in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) . The Cape

768-520: The eastern-western division was largely laid to rest. The system of multi-racial franchise also began a slow and fragile growth in political inclusiveness, and ethnic tensions subsided. In 1877, the state expanded by annexing Griqualand West and Griqualand East – that is, the Mount Currie district ( Kokstad ). The emergence of two Boer mini-republics along the Missionary Road resulted in 1885 in

816-548: The radius of the Earth in the southern hemisphere. He set out a baseline in the Swartland plain north of present-day Darling . Using triangulation he then measured a 137 km arc of meridian between Cape Town and Aurora , determining the astronomical latitudes of the end points by means of astronomical-geodetic observations. There is a memorial to his work at a location near Aurora, pictured here. His result suggested that

864-497: The British colonists and the Boers. Rhodes also brought in the first formal restrictions on the political rights of the Cape of Good Hope's black African citizens. The Cape of Good Hope remained nominally under British rule until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, when it became the province of the Cape of Good Hope, better known as the Cape Province . The districts of the colony in 1850 were: Population figures for

912-643: The Cape of Good Hope . South Africa became a sovereign state in 1931 by the Statute of Westminster . In 1961, it became the Republic of South Africa . Following the 1994 creation of the present-day South African provinces , the Cape Province was partitioned into the Eastern Cape , Northern Cape , and Western Cape , with smaller parts in North West province. An expedition of the VOC led by Jan van Riebeeck established

960-542: The Cape's Prime Minister in 1890, he instigated a rapid expansion of British influence into the hinterland. In particular, he sought to engineer the conquest of the Transvaal, and although his ill-fated Jameson Raid failed and brought down his government, it led to the Second Boer War and British conquest at the turn of the century. The politics of the colony consequently came to be increasingly dominated by tensions between

1008-408: The Dutch language. Many of the colonists who settled directly on the frontier became increasingly independent and localised in their loyalties. Known as Boers , they migrated beyond the Cape Colony's initial borders and had soon penetrated almost a thousand kilometres inland. Some Boers even adopted a nomadic lifestyle permanently and were denoted as trekboers . The VOC colonial period had

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1056-523: The Earth was more flattened towards the south pole than towards the north. George Everest , of the Indian Survey , while recuperating from an illness at the Cape nearly seventy years later, suggested that Lacaille's latitude observations had been affected by the deflection of the vertical , caused by gravitational attraction of Table Mountain at the southern end and by the Piketberg Mountain at

1104-567: The Gariep River, served as the boundary for some time, although some land between the river and the southern boundary of Botswana was later added to it. From 1878, the colony also included the enclave of Walvis Bay and the Penguin Islands , both in what is now Namibia . It united with three other colonies to form the Union of South Africa in 1910, and was accordingly renamed the Province of

1152-556: The Netherlands upon the Edict of Fontainebleau . This so-called "Huguenot experiment" was deemed a failure by the colonial authorities a decade later, as many of the Huguenot arrivals had little experience with agriculture and had become a net burden on the colonial government. There was a degree of cultural assimilation due to Dutch cultural hegemony that included the almost universal adoption of

1200-677: The Royal Academy of Sciences, summarised the improvements to astronomy that had occurred during his lifetime, to which he had made no small contribution. His death, probably caused in part by over-work, occurred in 1762. He was buried in the vaults of the Mazarin College, now the Institut de France in Paris. In 1754, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences . He

1248-614: The Warren Expedition, sent to annex the republics of Stellaland and Goshen (lands annexed to British Bechuanaland ). Major-General Charles Warren annexed the land south of the Molopo River as the colony of British Bechuanaland and proclaimed a protectorate over the land lying to the North of the river. Vryburg , the capital of Stellaland, became capital of British Bechuanaland, while Mafeking (now Mahikeng ), although situated south of

1296-450: The authority of the British governor did not relieve tensions in the colony between its eastern and western sections. In 1872, after a long political battle, the Cape of Good Hope achieved responsible government under its first Prime Minister, John Molteno . Henceforth, an elected Prime Minister and his cabinet had total responsibility for the affairs of the country. A period of strong economic growth and social development ensued, and

1344-438: The brighter component of which has a planet. Nu Octantis A also has a planet orbiting. HD 142022 is a binary system, a component of which is a sunlike star with a massive planet with an orbital period of 1928 ± 46 days. HD 212301 is a yellow-white main sequence star with a hot jupiter that completes an orbit every 2.2 days. NGC 2573 (also known as Polarissima Australis) is a faint barred spiral galaxy that happens to be

1392-656: The closest NGC object to the south celestial pole . NGC 7095 and NGC 7098 are two barred spiral galaxies that are 115 million and 95 million light-years distant from Earth respectively. The sparse open cluster Collinder 411 is also located in the constellation. USS  Octans  (AF-26) was a stores ship used by the United States Navy during World War II . Nicolas Louis de Lacaille Abbé Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille ( French: [nikɔla lwi də lakaj] ; 15 March 1713 – 21 March 1762), formerly sometimes spelled de la Caille ,

1440-445: The current southern pole star of Earth, Octans also contains the southern pole star of the planet Saturn , which is the magnitude 4.3 Delta Octantis . The Astronomical Society of Southern Africa in 2003 reported that observations of the Mira variable stars R and T Octantis were urgently needed. Four star systems are known to have planets. Mu Octantis is a binary star system,

1488-505: The government of the Cape Colony as well as Boer settlers finally died down when the Xhosa took part in a mass destruction of their own crops and cattle , in the belief that this would cause their ancestors to wake from the dead. The resulting famine crippled Xhosa country and ushered in a long period of stability on the border. Peace and prosperity, in addition to the Convict crisis of 1849, led to

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1536-413: The land within the fledgling colony's borders; in exchange they received tax exempt status and were loaned tools and seeds . Reflecting the multi-national nature of the early trading companies, the VOC granted vrijburger status to Dutch, Swiss, Scandinavian and German employees, among others. In 1688 they also sponsored the immigration of nearly two hundred French Huguenot refugees who had fled to

1584-519: The northern. In 1838, Thomas Maclear , who was Astronomer Royal at the Cape, repeated the measurements over a longer baseline ( Maclear's arc measurement ) and ultimately confirmed Everest's conjecture. Maclear's Beacon was erected on the Table Mountain in Cape Town to help with the verification. During his voyage to the southern hemisphere as a passenger on the vessel Le Glorieux , captained by

1632-563: The noted hydrographer Jean-Baptiste d'Après de Mannevillette, Lacaille became conscious of the difficulties in determining positions at sea. On his return to Paris he prepared the first set of tables of the Moon's position that was accurate enough to use for determining time and longitude by the method of 'Lunars' ( Lunar distances ) using the orbital theory of Clairaut . Lacaille was in fact an indefatigable calculator. Apart from constructing astronomical ephemerides and mathematical tables, he calculated

1680-493: The patronage of Jacques Cassini , obtained employment, first in surveying the coast from Nantes to Bayonne , then, in 1739, in remeasuring the French meridian arc , for which he is honoured with a pyramid at Juvisy-sur-Orge . The success of this difficult operation, which occupied two years, and achieved the correction of the anomalous result published by Jacques Cassini in 1718, was mainly due to Lacaille's industry and skill. He

1728-551: The protectorate border, became the protectorate's administrative centre. The border between the protectorate and the colony ran along the Molopo and Nossob rivers. In 1895, British Bechuanaland became part of the Cape Colony. However, the discovery of diamonds around Kimberley and gold in the Transvaal led to a return to instability, particularly because they fuelled the rise to power of the ambitious imperialist Cecil Rhodes . On becoming

1776-514: The same year). The British , who set up a colony on 8 January 1806, hoped to keep Napoleon out of the Cape, and to control the Far East trade routes. The Cape Colony at the time of British occupation was three months' sailing distance from London . The White colonial population was small, no more than 25,000 in all, scattered across a territory of 100,000 square miles. Most lived in Cape Town and

1824-589: The surrounding farming districts of the Boland , an area favoured with rich soils, a Mediterranean Climate and reliable rainfall. Cape Town had a population of 16,000 people. In 1814 the Dutch government formally ceded sovereignty over the Cape to the British , under the terms of the Convention of London . The British started to settle the eastern border of the Cape Colony, with the arrival in Port Elizabeth of

1872-597: The territory. The United East India Company transferred its territories and claims to the Batavian Republic (the Revolutionary period Dutch state) in 1798, and went bankrupt in 1799. Improving relations between Britain and Napoleonic France , and its vassal state the Batavian Republic , led the British to hand the Cape of Good Hope over to the Batavian Republic in 1803, under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens . In 1806,

1920-533: Was a French astronomer and geodesist who named 14 out of the 88 constellations . From 1750 to 1754, he studied the sky at the Cape of Good Hope in present-day South Africa . Lacaille observed over 10,000 stars using a refracting telescope . Born at Rumigny in the Ardennes in eastern France, he attended school in Mantes-sur-Seine (now Mantes-la-Jolie ). Afterwards, he studied rhetoric and philosophy at

1968-651: Was also an honorary member of the academies of Saint Petersburg and Berlin, the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Göttingen , and the Institute of Bologna. Lacaille has the honor of naming 14 different constellations : The crater " La Caille " on the Moon is named after him. Asteroid 9135 Lacaille (AKA 7609 P-L and 1994 EK6), discovered on 17 October 1960 by Cornelis Johannes van Houten , Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld and Tom Gehrels at Palomar Observatory ,

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2016-550: Was also named after him. In honor of his contribution to the study of the southern hemisphere sky, a 60-cm telescope at Réunion Island will be named the Lacaille Telescope. Cape Colony The Cape Colony ( Dutch : Kaapkolonie ), also known as the Cape of Good Hope , was a British colony in present-day South Africa named after the Cape of Good Hope . It existed from 1795 to 1802, and again from 1806 to 1910, when it united with three other colonies to form

2064-428: Was distressed to find himself an object of public attention. He resumed his work at the Mazarin College. In 1757 he published his Astronomiae Fundamenta Novissimus , containing a list of about 400 bright stars with positions corrected for aberration and nutation . He carried out calculations on comet orbits and was responsible for giving Halley's Comet its name. His last public lecture, given on 14 September 1761 at

2112-579: Was known as the Great Trek , and the migrating Boers settled inland, eventually forming the Boer Republics . British Immigration continued in the Cape, even as many of the Boers continued to trek inland, and the ending of the British East India Company 's monopoly on trade led to economic growth. At the same time, the long series of Xhosa Wars fought between the Xhosa people in the east and

2160-464: Was published posthumously in 1763. He found it necessary to introduce 14 new constellations which have since become standard. One of these was Mons Mensae , the only constellation named after a terrestrial feature (the Table Mountain ). An 1890 study of this catalogue by B. A. Gould found a considerable number of errors. While at the Cape , Lacaille performed an arc measurement to determine

2208-651: Was rewarded by admission to the Royal Academy of Sciences and appointment as Professor of mathematics in the Mazarin college of the University of Paris , where he constructed a small observatory fitted for his own use. He was the author of a number of influential textbooks and a firm advocate of Newtonian gravitational theory. His students included Antoine Lavoisier and Jean Sylvain Bailly , both of whom were later guillotined during

2256-470: Was the observations of nearly 10,000 southern stars, the production of which required observing every night for over a year. In the course of his survey he took note of 42 nebulous objects. He also achieved his aim of determining the lunar and solar parallaxes ( Mars serving as an intermediary). This work required near-simultaneous observations from Europe which were carried out by Jérôme Lalande . His southern catalogue, called Coelum Australe Stelliferum ,

2304-654: Was under VOC rule from 1652 to 1795 and under rule of the Napoleonic Batavia Republic from 1803 to 1806. The VOC lost the colony to Great Britain following the 1795 Battle of Muizenberg , but it was ceded to the Batavia Republic following the 1802 Treaty of Amiens . It was re-occupied by the British following the Battle of Blaauwberg in 1806, and British possession affirmed with the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 . The Cape of Good Hope then remained in

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