Draco, the Dragon Coiled Round the Pole

Draco, the Dragon, is a large northern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, winding a long sinuous course between the two Bears and coiling around the north celestial pole. Because of the slow wobble of the Earth's axis called precession, its star Thuban was the pole star some five thousand years ago, in the age of the Egyptian pyramids, before that role passed to Polaris. In Greek myth the dragon is often identified with Ladon, the serpent that guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides and was slain by Heracles, who kneels nearby. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a zodiac sign. These are the features of Draco as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading; its former pole star is a reminder that the sky's fixed points shift over the ages.

Draco's long coils border Camelopardalis, the early seventeenth-century giraffe filling the faint gap toward the pole, one of several constellations introduced in this period specifically because the region around the celestial pole, circumpolar and permanently visible from northern latitudes, had been left only partly mapped by the classical tradition.