Cassiopeia, the Queen on Her Throne

Cassiopeia is a prominent northern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, representing the vain queen of the Perseus myth, mother of Andromeda, set in the sky seated on her throne. Her five bright stars form an unmistakable W or M shape, opposite the Big Dipper across the pole, and because she is circumpolar from northern latitudes she never sets but wheels endlessly around Polaris. In the myth her boast that she or her daughter surpassed the sea-nymphs in beauty brought the wrath that sent the monster against Andromeda, and she was placed among the stars to circle the pole, at times hanging upside down as a humbling. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a zodiac sign. These are the features of Cassiopeia as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading.

Cassiopeia, like her husband Cepheus, borders the early seventeenth-century Camelopardalis, one of several constellations introduced in this period specifically to give a name to the large, faint stretches of circumpolar sky between the ancient, brighter figures that the Ptolemaic tradition had judged not worth outlining on its own. Cassiopeia's distinctive W shape has made it, alongside the Big Dipper on the opposite side of the pole, one of the most universally taught naked-eye landmarks for beginning stargazers learning to navigate the northern circumpolar sky.