Corvus, the Crow

Corvus is a small southern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, representing a crow or raven perched on the back of the water snake Hydra, beside the cup Crater. Its four main stars form a compact quadrilateral, easy to find though none is especially bright. In Greek myth Corvus is the crow of Apollo, punished for its tardiness and its lie in the tale of fetching water, set in the sky with the cup forever out of reach beyond the serpent. The crow is also linked in some tellings to the god's discovery of a lover's betrayal. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a zodiac sign. These are the features of Corvus as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading; its interest lies chiefly in the myth it shares with Crater and Hydra.

Corvus's neat, compact quadrilateral made it one of the easier ancient figures to bound precisely when the International Astronomical Union fixed official constellation boundaries in 1930, unlike its sprawling neighbour Hydra, whose enormous length made drawing a definitive edge a far more complicated exercise for the committee responsible. Corvus's myth, tying it to Crater and Hydra in a single continuous scene, is one of the clearer surviving examples of how the ancient constellation-makers sometimes built a whole narrative across several adjacent figures rather than inventing each in isolation.