Auriga, the Charioteer

Auriga is a bright northern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, representing a charioteer. Its leading star is Capella, one of the brightest in the northern sky, whose name means the little she-goat; the charioteer is traditionally shown carrying a goat and her kids on his shoulder, and the nearby stars are called the Kids. The Greeks variously identified the figure with Erichthonius of Athens, said to have invented the four-horse chariot, or with a herdsman. Auriga rides high overhead in winter and lies along the Milky Way, rich in star clusters. In astronomical tradition it is a pattern of stars rather than an astrological sign of the zodiac. These are the features of Auriga as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading of the region of sky it occupies.

Auriga sits close by two constellations that did not exist for Ptolemy at all: Lynx, introduced by Hevelius in 1687 and reportedly named for how sharp-eyed an observer would need to be to make out its faint stars, and Camelopardalis, the early seventeenth-century giraffe filling the large blank stretch toward the pole; both fill sky the ancient tradition simply passed over as too faint to bother naming.