Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, French priest, astronomer, and academic (born 1713)

Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille

French astronomer and geodesist

Abbé Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, formerly sometimes spelled de la Caille, 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…