First depicted on a celestial globe by Petrus Plancius in 1598, it was charted on a star atlas by Johann Bayer in his 1603 Uranometria.

The French explorer and astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille charted and gave the brighter stars their Bayer designations in 1756.

Apus was one of twelve constellations published by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman who had sailed on the first Dutch trading expedition, known as the Eerste Schipvaart, to the East Indies.

[5][2] After its introduction on Plancius's globe, the constellation's first known appearance in a celestial atlas was in German cartographer Johann Bayer's Uranometria of 1603.

[8][a] It is bordered by Ara, Triangulum Australe and Circinus to the north, Musca and Chamaeleon to the west, Octans to the south, and Pavo to the east.

[9] The official constellation boundaries, as set by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte in 1930,[b] are defined by a polygon of six segments (illustrated in infobox).

[15] It spent much of its life as a blue-white (B-type) main sequence star before expanding, cooling and brightening as it used up its core hydrogen.

[15] It is around 1.84 times as massive as the Sun, with a surface temperature of 4677 K.[19] Gamma Apodis is a yellow giant of spectral type G8III located 150 ± 4 light-years away,[14] with a magnitude of 3.87.

It is approximately 63 times as luminous the Sun, with a surface temperature of 5279 K.[18] Delta Apodis is a double star, the two components of which are 103 arcseconds apart and visible through binoculars.

Aged 250 ± 200 million years old, this star is emitting an excess of 24 μm infrared radiation, which may be caused by a debris disk of dust orbiting at a distance of more than 31 astronomical units from it.

[28] Located 780 ± 20 light-years distant, it shines with a luminosity estimated at 2059 times that of the Sun and has a surface temperature of 3568 K.[18] S Apodis is a rare R Coronae Borealis variable, an extremely hydrogen-deficient supergiant thought to have arisen as the result of the merger of two white dwarfs; fewer than 100 have been discovered as of 2012.

[33] It has a planet that is 79 times as massive as the Earth and orbits its sun every 330 days at an average distance of 0.89 astronomical units (AU).

[36] Of the deep-sky objects in Apus, there are two prominent globular clusters—NGC 6101 and IC 4499—and a large faint nebula that covers several degrees east of Beta and Gamma Apodis.