Lyra is a small but brilliant northern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, representing the lyre of Orpheus, the musician of Greek myth whose playing could charm all living things and even the lords of the underworld. It is dominated by Vega, one of the brightest stars in the sky and, through precession, a former and future pole star. Vega forms one corner of the great Summer Triangle with Deneb and Altair. Lyra also holds the famous Ring Nebula, a glowing shell of gas cast off by a dying star. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a zodiac sign. These are the features of Lyra as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading; despite its small size it is among the most celebrated of the summer constellations.
Immediately beside Lyra, Hevelius placed Vulpecula, the little fox, in his 1687 catalogue, one of several faint seventeenth-century constellations tucked into the gaps of the rich summer Milky Way that Ptolemy's forty-eight, composed for observers without any special mapping ambition beyond the brightest and most storied figures, had left unnamed. Vega has functioned as the effective zero point for the modern magnitude scale in much amateur and some professional practice, its brightness long used as a calibration standard against which other stars are measured, a role quite separate from anything in its old mythological association with Orpheus.