Equuleus, the Little Horse

Equuleus, the Little Horse or Foal, is a very small northern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight and the second smallest of all, showing only the head of a horse beside the far larger winged horse Pegasus. Its stars are faint and its identity slight; the classical tradition sometimes linked it to Celeris, a foal given by Hermes, or to the horse Cyllarus. It has little lore of its own, overshadowed by its great neighbour. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a zodiac sign. These are the features of Equuleus as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading of the region; its chief distinction is its smallness, a modest foal's head set among the grander figures of the autumn sky near the celestial equator.

Equuleus and its far larger neighbour Pegasus are both Ptolemaic, but the space around them was tidied up considerably later: no seventeenth or eighteenth-century astronomer felt the need to carve a further constellation from the sky immediately around the little horse, which is one reason it has remained essentially unchanged in outline since antiquity even as so many of its neighbours acquired new borders.