Corvus
“The Crow” · Southern · best around May evenings
Real star positions and magnitudes (HYG database via D3-Celestial, BSD-3). Lines are the conventional stick figure; north is up.
The story
Apollo's crow, punished for dawdling and lying — set where the Cup (Crater) is forever out of reach. Its trapezoid of four stars is surprisingly eye-catching in the spring sky; within its borders collide the famous Antennae galaxies.
How to find it
The compact trapezoid southwest of Spica.
✦ What lives inside it
The deep dive
Researched for the Atlas from Wikipedia — Corvus (constellation) (18,371 characters read) · updated Sep 20, 2026
01 A raven older than Greece itself
Long before Greek astronomers gave Corvus its familiar mythology, Babylonian stargazers had already drawn the Raven in roughly the same patch of sky. Cuneiform star catalogues dating to at least 1100 BCE record it as MUL.UGA.MUSHEN, seated on the tail of the Serpent just as it appears in Ptolemy's later catalogue. The Babylonians dedicated the figure to Adad, god of rain and storm, a choice that was calendrically meaningful: in the second millennium BCE the constellation rose just before the autumnal rainy season. Scholar John H. Rogers went further, arguing that Corvus, Crater, and Hydra together functioned as death symbols marking the gate to the underworld, with Hydra representing Ningishzida, the Babylonian underworld deity. The constellation also entered the iconography of Mithraism, which is thought to have spread from a Middle Eastern origin into ancient Greece and Rome. When these celestial figures were finally introduced to the Greeks around 500 BCE, Corvus and Crater marked the winter solstice while Aquila and Piscis Austrinus marked the summer one, giving the raven a precise role in the ancient ritual calendar.
02 Two punishments, one unlucky bird
The Greeks told at least two distinct cautionary tales about the raven in the sky. In the first, a pure white crow — called Lycius in some versions — informed Apollo that his lover Coronis the Lapith had been unfaithful. Apollo's response was to turn the bird's feathers permanently black in his rage, a mythological explanation for why ravens are dark. The second story explains the grouping of Corvus, Crater, and Hydra together in the sky. Apollo sent the crow to fetch water in a cup, but the bird dawdled to eat figs. Rather than admit this, the crow seized a water snake and presented it as the reason for the delay. Apollo saw through the lie immediately and hurled all three objects — crow, cup, and snake — into the heavens. As further punishment, he ensured the crow would be eternally thirsty, forever unable to reach the Cup just out of reach across the sky. These two narratives gave ancient stargazers a ready story for why three neighboring constellations form a coherent scene on the southern sky.
03 Ravens across the Pacific and Amazon
Corvus accumulated strikingly different identities far beyond the Mediterranean. Polynesian cultures recognized it as a constellation and used it for ocean navigation: in the Marquesas Islands it was called Mee, in Pukapuka Te Manu, and in the Society Islands Metua-ai-papa. Torres Strait Islanders placed the stars as the right hand — holding kupa fruit — of a large figure called Tagai, a man fishing. In central Brazil the Bororo people of Mato Grosso saw a land tortoise named Geriguigui in the same stars, while the Tucano people of the northwestern Amazon saw an egret. The Tupi people of São Luís Island interpreted Corvus, possibly, as a barbecue grill called seychouioura, on which fish were grilled, though scholars note the identification could also refer to the Great Square of Pegasus. Meanwhile, Chinese astronomy folded the stars into the Vermilion Bird of the South, with the four main stars forming a chariot called Zhen, the 28th and final lunar mansion; individual stars carried specific meanings, with Zeta Corvi named Changsha and associated with a coffin. In Indian astronomy, five main stars of Corvus represent a hand or fist, corresponding to Hasta, the 13th nakshatra.
04 Gienah: an aging giant marking the wing Deeper
Gamma Corvi, traditionally named Gienah from the Arabic word for wing, is the brightest star in the constellation at magnitude 2.59. It sits 154 light-years from Earth and belongs to spectral type B8III, making it a blue-white giant that is 4.2 times as massive as the Sun and 355 times as luminous. At an age of around 160 million years, it has largely exhausted its core hydrogen and is beginning to expand and cool as it leaves the main sequence — still cosmically young by the standards of Sun-like stars, but already an elder statesman among massive blue stars. Gienah is not alone: a companion dwarf star of spectral type somewhere between K5V and M5V, roughly 0.8 times the Sun's mass, orbits about 50 astronomical units away — roughly the distance between the Sun and Pluto doubled — and completes one orbit in an estimated 158 years. Together with Delta Corvi, Gienah serves as a pointer star toward Spica, the bright alpha star of Virgo, making it a practical landmark for navigating the spring sky in the Northern Hemisphere.
05 Algorab: a star that defies its own age Deeper
Delta Corvi, called Algorab from the Arabic for 'the raven', sits roughly 87 light-years away and shines at magnitude 2.9, making it the second-brightest star in the constellation. Its spectral type is listed as A0IV, suggesting a star that has begun to evolve off the main sequence, but Delta Corvi is genuinely puzzling: it is 65 to 70 times more luminous than the Sun yet has a surface temperature of only 10,400 K, which is cooler than its luminosity would predict. This mismatch means it could be either a very young pre-main-sequence star just 3.2 million years old that hasn't yet settled, or a 260-million-year-old star beginning to exhaust its core hydrogen. Warm circumstellar dust has been detected within its inner stellar system, adding to the intrigue. Its companion, Delta Corvi B, is an orange K-type dwarf at magnitude 8.51, itself surrounded by circumstellar dust; classed as a post-T Tauri star, it orbits at least 650 astronomical units away and requires at least 9,400 years to complete one circuit — so no living astronomer will ever watch it move perceptibly.
06 Eta Corvi and its double debris belts Deeper
Eta Corvi is a yellow-white main-sequence star of spectral type F2V, 59 light-years from the Solar System and 1.52 times as massive as the Sun. What makes it especially interesting to planet-formation researchers is that it hosts two distinct debris disks detected in observations. One warm disk lies within 3.5 astronomical units of the star, placing it in the zone equivalent to our inner Solar System. A second, cold disk extends to roughly 150 astronomical units out, comparable in location to the outer reaches of our own Kuiper Belt, but far wider in scope. The coexistence of both an inner and an outer belt separated by a large gap raises questions about what might lurk between them — debris disks structured this way are often interpreted as evidence of unseen planets shepherding or disrupting the dust. Eta Corvi also marks one of the two linchpins for the wheels of the chariot figure Zhen in Chinese astronomy, illustrating how the same star can carry utterly different cultural weight depending on the tradition.
07 When a star was mistaken for a moon
One of Corvus's more curious episodes in the history of planetary science involves 31 Crateris, a star that John Flamsteed originally catalogued in the adjacent constellation Crater, but which ended up inside Corvus once Eugène Delporte fixed official constellation boundaries in 1930. On March 27, 1974, the Mariner 10 spacecraft detected ultraviolet emissions that initially appeared to come from Mercury, briefly suggesting the planet had a satellite. The source turned out to be 31 Crateris itself, a remote binary star whose hot blue-white primary belongs to spectral type B1.5V. That primary is around 15.5 times as massive as the Sun and an extraordinary 52,262 times as luminous — meaning it rivals some of the most powerful stars visible to the naked eye, yet it sits so far away that it registers only at magnitude 5.26. The two stars in the binary orbit each other every 2.9631 days, and the primary is considered a possible blue straggler of the Hyades moving group. The false moon mystery lasted only until the stellar identification was made, but it remains a memorable example of how a misidentified star can briefly redirect an entire line of planetary science inquiry.
08 The Antennae: two galaxies in collision
The most famous deep-sky spectacle in Corvus is the Antennae Galaxies, formed by NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, two spiral galaxies 45 million light-years from Earth that are currently merging. Seen from our vantage point they appear heart-shaped, but long-exposure images reveal enormous tidal tails sweeping away from both ends — the structures that give the pair their nickname, because they resemble an insect's antennae. Those tails formed from the original rotational momentum of both spiral galaxies as gravity began pulling them together. The collision has triggered extensive star formation as enormous gas clouds collide and compress. Both galaxies host multiple ultraluminous X-ray sources whose exact nature remains debated: they could be a rare class of X-ray-emitting binary stars or intermediate-mass black holes, a question not yet settled. In a backyard telescope the pair appears around 10th magnitude, bright enough for modest instruments. The system has already produced two recorded supernovae, SN 2004gt (a Type Ic event on December 12, 2004) and SN 2007sr (a Type Ia event peaking December 14, 2007), and astronomers continue to monitor it specifically because its ongoing starburst makes further supernovae likely.
09 Variable stars from slow to lightning-fast Deeper
Corvus harbors a surprisingly varied collection of intrinsically variable stars. R Corvi is a Mira-type long-period variable that swings from magnitude 6.7 all the way to 14.4 — a factor of roughly 630 in brightness — with a period of about 317 days, visible in binoculars near peak but requiring a telescope at minimum. It lies close enough to Gienah to share the same binocular field. TT Corvi is a semiregular red giant of spectral type M3III at magnitude 6.48, located about 923 light-years away and radiating around 993 times the Sun's luminosity. At the opposite extreme for timescale sits TU Corvi, a Delta Scuti variable that pulses through a change of just 0.025 of a magnitude in a cycle of only 59 minutes — a class of short-period pulsators used both as standard candles and as laboratories for asteroseismology. TV Corvi, discovered independently by Clyde Tombaugh in 1931 and David Levy in 1990 and 2005, is a dwarf nova composed of a white dwarf and a brown dwarf orbiting each other every 90 minutes. It normally sits at magnitude 17 — far beyond amateur reach — but brightens periodically to magnitude 12 during outbursts driven by mass transfer instabilities.
10 Exoplanets hiding in a small constellation Deeper
Despite its modest size of 184 square degrees, Corvus contains three confirmed planetary systems and one unconfirmed candidate. HD 103774, a yellow-white main-sequence star 181 light-years away and 1.335 times the Sun's mass, was found in 2013 to host a Neptune-sized planet completing an orbit every 5.9 days — close enough to its star to experience intense stellar heating. HD 104067, an orange K2V dwarf at just 69 light-years distance and about 80 percent of the Sun's mass, is orbited by a planet 3.6 times the mass of Neptune every 55.8 days. WASP-83 harbors a Saturn-mass planet discovered by the transit method in 2015, circling every 5 days. A fourth system, HD 111031, a G5V sunlike star 101 light-years away, has an as-yet-unconfirmed planetary companion. Nearby in the constellation, the triple brown-dwarf system VHS J1256–1257 lies only 72.4 light-years away and includes a central equal-mass binary pair of late-M dwarfs and a widely separated planetary-mass brown dwarf companion at 102 astronomical units — a system that blurs the boundary between planets and failed stars.
11 Boundary decisions and a borrowed star
Corvus occupies only 184 square degrees of sky, ranking 70th in area among the 88 IAU constellations and covering just 0.446 percent of the celestial sphere. It is bordered by Virgo to the north and east, Hydra to the south, and Crater to the west — a tight neighborhood in the southern spring sky. The three-letter abbreviation Crv was adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1922. Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte drew the official borders in 1930 as a six-sided polygon, with right ascension running from 11h 56m 22s to 12h 56m 40s and declination from −11.68° to −25.20°. Those same boundaries created a small administrative puzzle: the star 31 Crateris, which John Flamsteed had catalogued as belonging to Crater, found itself inside Corvus once the lines were drawn. Within those final borders, 29 stars reach apparent magnitude 6.5 or brighter, the traditional naked-eye limit, giving patient dark-sky observers a genuinely rich field despite the constellation's unassuming size. The whole constellation is accessible to any observer south of latitude 65°N.
12 Krypton's real stellar address
In January 2013 a comic book gave Corvus an unexpected pop-culture footnote. Action Comics issue 14, published in November 2012, featured astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as a character who calculates the location of Superman's home planet Krypton. Tyson assisted DC Comics in choosing an actual star that would work scientifically as Krypton's parent sun, and he selected the red dwarf LHS 2520, located in Corvus at a distance of 27.1 light-years from Earth. The in-universe rationale added a layer of wordplay: the Smallville high school football team is called the Crows, making Corvus — Latin for raven or crow — an appropriate mascot constellation for Superman's adopted hometown. The choice of a real red dwarf star, rather than a fictional one, was a deliberate effort to ground superhero mythology in actual stellar catalogues, giving amateur astronomers a precise target if they want to point a telescope at the fictional birthplace of the Man of Steel.
13 Meteor showers, confirmed and elusive Deeper
Corvus is the nominal radiant for two meteor showers with very different observational histories. German astronomer Cuno Hoffmeister discovered and named the Corvids in 1937 after observing activity between June 25 and July 2, noting that the shower's trajectory resembled that of comet 11P/Tempel–Swift–LINEAR. However, the Corvids have not been detected since, and no evidence for them was found when earlier records were examined; a 2011 study by Zhukov and colleagues could not confirm the comet link, though a tentative connection with the object 4015 Wilson–Harrington has been proposed. The Corvids thus remain one of astronomy's more puzzling claimed showers. The Eta Corvids have a better evidential footing: in January 2013 the MO Video Meteor Network announced the discovery after cataloguing around 300 meteors seen between January 20 and 26, and their existence was confirmed through data analysis later that same year, giving Corvus at least one securely established radiant.