- Star Tales - Corvus and Crater (ianridpath.com)
These two adjacent constellations are linked in a moral tale that goes back at least to the time of Eratosthenes in the third century BC. As told by Ovid in his Fasti, Apollo was about to make a sacrifice to Zeus and sent the crow to fetch water from a running spring. The crow flew off with a bowl in its claws until it came to a fig tree laden with unripe fruit. Ignoring its orders, the crow waited several days for the fruit to ripen, by which time Apollo had been forced to find a source of water for himself.
- Finally, if there be still persons who are not sufficiently persuaded of the existence of God and of the soul, by the reasons I have adduced, I am desirous that they should know that all the other propositions, of the truth of which they deem themselves perhaps more assured, as that we have a body, and that there exist stars and an earth, and such like, are less certain; for, although we have a moral assurance of these things, which is so strong that there is an appearance of extravagance in doubting of their existence, yet at the same time no one, unless his intellect is impaired, can deny, when the question relates to a metaphysical certitude, that there is sufficient reason to exclude entire assurance, in the observation that when asleep we can in the same way imagine ourselves possessed of another body and that we see other stars and another earth, when there is nothing of the kind.
- Corvus (constellation) (Wikipedia)
Corvus is a small constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere. Its name means “crow” in Latin. One of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy, it depicts a raven, a bird associated with stories about the god Apollo, perched on the back of Hydra the water snake. The four brightest stars, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Beta Corvi, form a distinctive quadrilateral in the night sky.
