Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown

Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, is a small but elegant northern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, whose seven chief stars form a graceful arc like a jewelled diadem or crown. In Greek myth it is the crown of Ariadne, given her by Dionysus and set among the stars, its brightest jewel the star Alphecca, whose name means the broken one, from the Arabic for the broken ring of stars. The semicircle is easy to recognise between Bootes and Hercules. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a zodiac sign. These are the features of Corona Borealis as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading; its clear ring of stars has made it one of the more beloved of the small constellations of the northern sky.

Corona Borealis is one of the few small Ptolemaic constellations with no seventeenth or eighteenth-century additions carved from its immediate borders, its compact arc of stars evidently too tightly bound as a recognisable shape for later astronomers to see any use in subdividing the faint space around it. Alphecca's own broken-ring etymology, discussed at length under its own entry among this atlas's stars, gives the crown's brightest jewel a name that describes the shape of the whole constellation rather than any property of the star itself.