The 1755 catalogue of Nicolas Louis de Lacaille divided it into the three modern constellations that occupy much of the same area: Carina (the keel), Puppis (the poop deck or stern), and Vela (the sails).

[3] All the stars of Argo Navis are easily visible from the tropics southward and pass near zenith from southern temperate latitudes.

"[4] Some academics theorized a Sumerian origin related to the Epic of Gilgamesh, a hypothesis rejected for lack of evidence that Mesopotamian cultures considered these stars, or any portion of them, to form a boat.

In Ptolemy's Almagest, Argo Navis occupies the portion of the Milky Way between Canis Major and Centaurus, with stars marking such details as the "little shield", the "steering-oar", the "mast-holder", and the "stern-ornament",[5] which continued to be reflected in cartographic representations in celestial atlases into the nineteenth century (see below).

[7] Lacaille replaced Bayer's designations with new ones that followed stellar magnitudes more closely, but used only a single Greek-letter sequence and described the constellation for those stars as "Argûs".

[13] In addition, the constellation Pyxis (the mariner's compass) occupies an area near what in antiquity was considered part of Argo's mast.

[1] Lacaille considered it a separate constellation representing a modern scientific instrument (like Microscopium and Telescopium), that he created for maps of the stars of the southern hemisphere.