Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille had a great imagination. In the 1750s, the French astronomer mapped more than 10,000 stars from the southern tip of Africa. Lacaille used those stars to create 14 new constellations.

One of them is Sculptor. Lacaille originally called it the Sculptor’s Studio. It depicted a carved head atop a stool, plus a hammer and chisel and a block of granite.

But all of that takes a lot of imagination to see. All of the constellation’s stars are so faint that Sculptor is invisible from light-polluted cities and suburbs.

Sculptor is important to astronomers, though, because many galaxies lie within its borders. The closest of them is the Sculptor Dwarf. It’s just 300,000 light-years away, and it orbits our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

The galaxy contains only 30 million stars or so. But most of them are ancient – far older than most of the stars in the Milky Way. That means the Sculptor Dwarf may be a remnant from the early universe – like the many building blocks that came together to form the Milky Way. So studying the galaxy can tell us much more about the early universe, and the history of our own galaxy.

From most of the United States, Sculptor is low in the southeast in early evening,. But you need a dark sky to make out any of its stars – and a good imagination to “see” a pattern in them.

We’ll have more about Sculptor tomorrow.

Script by Damond Benningfield