Corona Australis, the Southern Crown

Corona Australis, the Southern Crown, is a small southern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, the southern counterpart to the Northern Crown, its faint stars forming a delicate arc beneath the feet of Sagittarius the archer. The classical tradition sometimes saw it as a wreath or garland rather than a crown. Though none of its stars is bright, the semicircle is neat and distinct, set against a rich region of the Milky Way that holds nebulae and clusters. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a zodiac sign. These are the features of Corona Australis as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading; it pairs with its northern namesake as one of the two small crowns set among the larger figures of the sky.

Corona Australis, like Ara its neighbour, borders Lacaille's eighteenth-century Telescopium, so that this corner of the southern sky mixes a small, ancient, mythologically named crown with an eighteenth-century constellation commemorating the very instrument used to chart it precisely for the first time. Corona Australis appears already in some of the oldest surviving Greek constellation lists, considerably more securely ancient than its far larger neighbour Sagittarius acquired any settled fixed form, though its faint stars have always kept it a minor figure next to the archer it sits beneath.