Sagitta, the Arrow, is a tiny northern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight and the third smallest of all, its few stars neatly forming the shape of an arrow in flight amid the Milky Way between Aquila and Cygnus. Despite its faintness it is old and widely recognised; the Greeks variously took it for an arrow of Heracles, of Apollo, or of Eros, the shaft of some divine archer left among the stars. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a zodiac sign, and it should not be confused with the far larger zodiacal Sagittarius, the archer, whose name it resembles. These are the features of Sagitta as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading; its clear little arrow-shape makes it a satisfying find in a dark summer sky.
Vulpecula, Hevelius's little fox of 1687, borders Sagitta as well as Lyra and Cygnus, filling the faint triangular gap of Milky Way sky between three much older and brighter Ptolemaic figures, a fair illustration of how the seventeenth-century additions typically occupied exactly the dim, previously unclaimed spaces between the ancient constellations rather than displacing them. Despite being the third smallest of the eighty-eight modern constellations, Sagitta's clean, simple arrow shape has kept it recognisable and included in essentially every constellation list compiled since antiquity, unlike many other small figures that later fell out of use.