Crater shares its myth with Corvus and Hydra, the crow, the serpent and the cup set together as a lasting rebuke. What the shared story does not mention is how thoroughly empty the cup itself has turned out to be by the standards of later astronomy.
Crater contains no star brighter than roughly fourth magnitude and no object at all from Charles Messier's eighteenth-century catalogue of nebulae and star clusters, an unusual gap among Ptolemy's forty-eight and one that has kept the constellation essentially absent from the deep-sky observing tradition that grew up around brighter, richer neighbours. Where Corvus, sitting right beside it, hosts colliding galaxies bright enough to be studied in detail, and Hydra beneath it holds an entire cluster of distant galaxies, Crater offers modern telescopes very little beyond the outline itself.
That outline remains, by most accounts, one of the more literally recognisable of the fainter constellations, its handful of modest stars tracing a wide, shallow bowl closely enough that the shape reads clearly even to someone unfamiliar with the myth behind it.
A cup that carries a story about being kept perpetually unfilled has turned out, by coincidence, to be one of the emptiest patches of sky in the whole catalogue by the measure later astronomers actually use.