- Star Tales - Draco (ianridpath.com)
Coiled around the sky’s north pole is the celestial dragon, Draco, known to the Greeks as Δράκων (i.e. Drakon). Legend has it that this is the dragon slain by Heracles during one of his labours, and in the sky the dragon is depicted with one foot of Heracles (in the form of the neighbouring constellation Hercules) planted firmly upon its head. This dragon, named Ladon, guarded the precious tree on which grew the golden apples.
- Star Tales - Camelopardalis (ianridpath.com)
One of the most unlikely animals to be found in the sky is a giraffe. The Greeks called giraffes ‘camel leopards’ because of their long necks and spots, which is where the name Camelopardalis comes from. However, the constellation Camelopardalis was not invented by the Greeks but by the Dutch theologian and astronomer Petrus Plancius in 1612. Plancius first showed it on a celestial globe in that year along with another odd constellation that is still recognized, Monoceros.
- Star Tales - Cepheus (ianridpath.com)
Cepheus was the mythological king of Ethiopia. He was deemed worthy of a place in the sky because he was fourth in descent from the nymph Io, one of the loves of Zeus – and having Zeus as a relative was always an advantage when it came to being commemorated among the constellations. The kingdom of Cepheus was not the Ethiopia we know today, but stretched from the south-eastern shore of the Mediterranean southwards to the Red Sea, an area that contains parts of the modern Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Ptolemy described him as wearing the tiara-like head-dress of a Persian king, as he is shown on John Flamsteed’s star atlas…
- The Little Bear was said by the Greeks to have been first named by the astronomer Thales of Miletus, who lived from about 625 to 545 BC. The earliest reference to it seems to have been made by the poet Callimachus of the third century BC, who reported that Thales ‘measured out the little stars of the Wain [wagon] by which the Phoenicians sail’. The little bear was evidently unknown to Homer, two centuries before Thales, for he wrote only of the Great Bear, never mentioning its smaller counterpart.