The Hercules Family --- The Constellation of Corvus The Crow

Corvus perches on the back of Hydra. When Crater was also seen as a black bird it too perched on the serpent's back, forming the doorposts and threshold to the Mesopotamian Land of The Dead.

Corvus The Crow, our eleventh member of the Hercules Family of Constellations, is a small rectangular constellation that resembles a crow only by the furthest stretch of the imagination --- and the ancient Babylonians, who called this constellation "The Raven" were imaginative. It made a pair with the constellation the Babylonians called Mulugumushen (another crow or raven), today's Crater The Cup, as one of the doorposts of the entryway to the Land of the Dead. Hydra The Multiheaded Serpent was the threshold. The ancient Chinese called Corvus "The Spanker," naming it for the aft sail on a junk (and it more resembles a spanker than any bird). Nonetheless, Corvus stuck in European legend. Medieval monks claimed that the constellation Argo was in reality Noah's Ark, and that two constellations, Corvus and Columba The Dove, were the birds that Noah had sent aloft after the Deluge. 

Corvus is a dim and small constellation with just one notable star, Gienah (Number 29 in the Nautical Almanac). It does have one fascinating deep sky object, the "Antennae Galaxies". The Antennae Galaxies are gravitationally bound and merging, just as our own Milky Way and neighboring Andromeda will someday become a single galaxy. The Antennae are two long corresponding trails of stellar material, one extending from each galaxy, that resemble tracks in the sky or, together, an insect's antennae.

The Antennae Galaxies, 45 million light years away, give us a glimpse of the future of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies as they merge.

Dragged into one body by gravity, both spiral members of the Antennae Galaxies have left a long curving footprint across the heavens. What will be formed is an elliptical galaxy, and the friction of dust and gas will give birth to millions of hot blue short-lived stars.