57 Fun Facts About Cancer Zodiac Sign

In astrology, people born under Cancer are said to care most about which area of life?

Home and family mean everything to the sign, and astrologers read the crab's shell the same way: a guarded exterior around a nurturing and fiercely loyal interior.

Cancer is which sign in the order of the zodiac?

4th in the zodiac's order, Cancer begins where spring ends: the Sun enters the sign at the June solstice, when daylight in the north is at its peak.

Which celestial body rules the sign of Cancer?

The Moon stands in astrology for comfort, mothering and emotion, which is where Cancer gets its reputation as the zodiac's great nurturer.

Cancer belongs to which classical element?

Water is astrology's element of feeling, which is why Cancer, first of the three water signs, is read as the one who senses what other people are feeling.

What is Cancer's modality in astrology?

Cardinal comes from the Latin cardo, a hinge: the four such signs are the ones the year turns on, each opening a season, and Cancer's is northern summer.

Which sign sits opposite Cancer on the zodiac wheel?

Capricorn begins around December 22, half a year after Cancer's June start, so the two face each other across the wheel like midsummer and midwinter.

Which of these birthdays falls under the sign of Cancer?

July 4 sits in the middle of Cancer's run, from about June 22 to July 22; the sign opens at the June solstice, so its first day is the longest of the northern year.

Each sign, Cancer included, covers 30 degrees of which path across the sky?

The ecliptic is the Sun's yearly path against the stars, and Cancer's slice runs from 90 to 120 degrees along it; the slices are fixed to the seasons, so precession has slid each sign off the constellation it was named for.

Cancer is one of the six signs of which polarity?

Negative is no insult here: astrologers alternate the twelve signs between positive and negative, and the negative six are also called feminine, receptive or yin.

Which planet, long called the 'Greater Fortune', is traditionally said to be exalted in Cancer?

Jupiter's exaltation in Cancer is one of astrology's oldest rules: Babylonian omen texts already gave each planet a 'secret place', and the king of the planets had his beside the Crab.

The Tropic of Cancer runs across which desert?

The Sahara straddles the line for a reason: air that rises near the equator sinks again around these latitudes, arriving dry after shedding its rain over the tropical forests.

In ancient Egypt the sign of Cancer was conceived as which creature?

A scarab beetle stood for the Sun's daily rebirth: Egyptians pictured the god Khepri rolling the Sun across the sky the way a dung beetle rolls its ball.

The Swedish name for Cancer, 'Kräftan', means what?

Crayfish is the word's everyday sense, as in the kräftskiva parties Swedes throw each August to eat them; in older Swedish the same word named the disease too, as 'cancer' does in English.

What is the sign of Cancer called in Hindu astrology?

Karka is Sanskrit for crab, a sign India shares with the West because Greek astrology reached it in Sanskrit translations in the early centuries AD, though some scholars argue the Indian system grew up on its own.

The American Heritage Dictionary traces the word 'Cancer' to an Indo-European root with what meaning?

Hard is the sense that dictionary gives the root kar-, which also lies behind the English word 'hard' itself; on that reading the crab was named for its shell, though other scholars trace the Latin word to a different root.

In Greek myth, the crab attacked Heracles while he was fighting which monster?

The Lernaean Hydra was said to sprout two new heads for every one struck off, so the crab's ambush from the swamp caught Heracles at the worst possible moment.

Which goddess placed the crab among the stars after Hercules killed it?

Hera was the hero's great enemy, so she rewarded the crab's loyal if useless attack with a place among the stars; Roman writers give the same credit to Juno.

How did Heracles kill the giant crab?

He crushed it under his foot in most retellings, furious at being nipped in the middle of a fight; the mythographer Apollodorus says only that he killed it.

The crab struck during Heracles' second labour, but which beast had he faced first?

The Nemean Lion had a hide no weapon could pierce, so Heracles choked it with his bare hands and afterwards wore its skin as a cape.

Which Greek physician is credited with first describing tumours as 'karkinos', the Greek for crab?

Hippocrates gets the credit, likely because tumours with their swollen veins looked like crabs to him; the Roman writer Celsus later turned the word into the Latin 'cancer', so sign and disease share a name.

Which two constellations flank Cancer along the zodiac?

Gemini and Leo sit either side, in the same order the signs follow through the calendar: the Twins' dates come just before Cancer's and the Lion's just after.

How does Cancer rank for brightness among the zodiac constellations?

It is the dimmest of the twelve: not one of its stars reaches third magnitude, and under city lights the whole figure vanishes from view.

Ancient skywatchers took the sudden fading of the Beehive Cluster in a clear sky as a warning of what?

A coming storm: the cluster is so faint that the first gathering haze blots it out while brighter stars nearby still shine, so Aratus and Pliny both took its vanishing from a clear-looking sky as an early warning.

What does Acubens, the common name of Alpha Cancri, mean?

The claw is what its Arabic name means, and the star does mark the Crab's southern pincer; the same name was long shared with the star on the northern one.

In the medieval 'zodiac man' diagram, which part of the body was Cancer said to govern?

The chest belonged to the Crab: the scheme laid the twelve signs down the body in calendar order from head to feet, and the midsummer sign landed on the breast.

The stars Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis represent what?

Two donkeys, a northern and a southern: in Greek myth gods rode them into battle, where their braying, a sound the enemy is said never to have heard, started a rout, and they were afterwards put among the stars.

Which god and his tutor rode into battle on the animals now marked by the Aselli?

Dionysus and Silenus are the riders in one version; the beasts' unfamiliar cries were said to have panicked the gods' enemies, and the pair were set in the sky as thanks.

Long before it was nicknamed the Beehive, Messier 44 was 'Praesepe', Latin for what?

Manger is the usual sense, a feeding trough for the two stars that flank the misty patch; the same Latin word could also mean a hive, which suits the cluster's modern nickname.

Which ancient astronomer's star catalogue describes the Beehive as a 'nebulous mass' in the Crab's breast?

Ptolemy listed it in the Almagest among a handful of 'nebulous' objects, with no way of knowing the misty patch was really a swarm of stars too faint to separate by eye.

Ancient Chinese astronomers saw the Beehive Cluster as what?

A ghost riding in a carriage is one Chinese picture of it: the cluster lies in the lunar mansion named Ghost, and its pale glow was also likened to a heap of corpses.

Roughly how far away is the Beehive Cluster?

About 590 light-years makes it one of the nearest star clusters to Earth, close enough that its thousand or so faint suns show as a smudge to the naked eye on a dark night.

The Beehive Cluster shares an age and motion with which other famous cluster, suggesting a common origin?

The Hyades drift through space in the same direction and are of similar age, so astronomers think both clusters were born in one great cloud and have since wandered hundreds of light-years apart.

Which German cartographer's 1603 atlas labelled Cancer's stars with Greek letters and showed the Beehive as a star?

Johann Bayer's atlas was the Uranometria, where the whole cluster went in as a single hazy star labelled Epsilon; the letter now belongs to its brightest member.

Messier 67, the other open cluster in Cancer, is remarkable for being what?

Billions of years old, roughly the Sun's own age, when most such loose clusters are young; about a hundred of its stars are so Sun-like that astronomers once wondered if the Sun was born there.

Three planets of 55 Cancri were named Brahe, Janssen and Harriot in 2015, so what was the star itself named?

Copernicus, who put the Sun at the centre of the planets, now names the star, and five later astronomers and telescope makers name the worlds circling it; a Dutch astronomy society proposed the set and a public vote chose it.

NASA describes 55 Cancri e, a planet circling a star in Cancer, as covered by a global ocean of what?

Lava is the best reading of the data: the planet hugs its star so tightly that a year there lasts under 18 hours, leaving the surface hot enough to stay molten.

For someone in Sydney or Cape Town, a Cancer birthday falls in which season?

Winter, because the seasons flip below the equator: the same June solstice that gives the north its longest day gives the southern half of the world its shortest.

OJ 287, a galaxy billions of light-years away in Cancer, holds one of the largest known examples of what?

A supermassive black hole estimated at some 18 billion Suns sits at its heart, and a smaller one plunges through the gas disc around it about twice every 12 years, setting off flares brighter than a trillion stars.

Cancer opens the zodiac's summer quarter; which sign opens spring and with it the whole zodiac year?

Aries begins at the spring equinox of the northern year, the traditional start of the astrological calendar, which is why lists of the twelve signs still open with the Ram.

In which month is Cancer best placed for viewing at 9 p.m.?

March is when the Crab stands highest in the evening sky for northern observers; by high summer the Sun itself is passing through it and its stars are lost in daylight.

The Tropic of Cancer marks the northernmost latitude at which the Sun can do what?

Appear directly overhead, so that an upright pole casts no shadow at noon: towns inside the tropics get two such days a year, but on the line itself there is only one, at the June solstice.

Because of precession, the Sun at the June solstice is now actually in which constellation, not Cancer?

Taurus now hosts the solstice Sun: the slow wobble of Earth's axis has carried that point two constellations along the zodiac since the tropic was named some 2,000 years ago.

The Tropic of Cancer marks the southern limit of which alliance's mutual-defence obligation?

NATO's founding treaty covers members' islands only in the North Atlantic north of the line, which is why Argentina's 1982 invasion of the Falklands never triggered the alliance's defence clause.

Which poet wrote that if Cancer had one such crystal, winter would have a month of one sole day?

Dante Alighieri put it in the Paradiso: the Crab is up all through the long midwinter nights, so a single star there as bright as the Sun would make a whole month one unbroken day.

Which American wrote 'Tropic of Cancer', a 1934 Paris novel banned in the United States until the 1960s?

Henry Miller based it on his own hand-to-mouth years in Paris; Americans read smuggled copies for decades, and the first US edition in 1961 set off obscenity trials that ran to the Supreme Court.

Which famous 1563 planetary conjunction, observed by Tycho Brahe, occurred in Cancer near the Beehive?

Jupiter and Saturn met beside the cluster that August, days away from the date the best tables of the time predicted, and the error set the teenage Brahe on a lifetime of precise measuring.

The Babylonian name MUL.AL.LUL for the constellation could mean a crab or which other animal?

A snapping turtle is the other reading, and it suits the art: a turtle or tortoise, never yet a plain crab, is what turns up on Babylonian boundary stones.

The Sun enters Cancer at the June solstice, when crowds gather at dawn at which English monument?

Stonehenge was built to line up with the solstices: on midsummer morning the Sun rises behind the Heel Stone and its first rays reach into the heart of the circle.

The Sun spends longest in Cancer because Earth is then doing what?

Moving slowest in orbit, because Earth is then at its farthest from the Sun; the Sun seems to creep along and needs over 31 days to cross the sign, the longest stay of the twelve.

The word 'tropic' in Tropic of Cancer comes from a Greek word meaning what?

Turning is the sense of the Greek tropē: at the June solstice the Sun stops its northward climb above this line and appears to turn back toward the equator.

The Tropic of Cancer crosses which of these countries?

Mexico is crossed by the line, which roughly divides the country into a temperate north and a tropical south.

Which Latin epithet, meaning shore-dwelling, did the Roman poets Manilius and Ovid give the Crab?

Litoreus comes from litus, the Latin for seashore and the root of 'littoral'; Ovid has the shore-dwelling Crab's arms burn at noon to mark a summer day, since the Sun stands in the sign at midsummer.

In Renaissance astrology, which two goddesses were the divine associations of Cancer?

Luna and Diana were both honoured in Rome as goddess of the same heavenly body, the one astrologers pair with the Crab, though Diana probably began as a goddess of the hunt and the wild and took on that role only later.

Platonist philosophers called Cancer the 'Gate of Men', a door in the sky for what?

Souls coming down to be born were said to enter through the Crab; the philosopher Porphyry wrote that they climbed back to heaven through the sign on the opposite side of the zodiac.

Medieval medicine gave each zodiac element one of the four temperaments; which did Cancer's element get?

Phlegmatic, the cold and moist temperament, went to Cancer and the two signs that share its element, and a cool, calm, slow-to-stir person is still called phlegmatic today.

A planet is 'in detriment' in the sign opposite the one it rules; which planet is in detriment in Cancer?

Saturn rules the sign directly across the wheel from the Crab, and astrologers hold that a planet placed opposite its home is weakened because the natures of the two clash.

Chinese astronomers placed Cancer's stars in which of their four sky regions?

The Vermilion Bird of the South carries the colour of fire, the element Chinese thought matched with the south and with summer, and the Crab's central stars form one of the bird's seven lunar mansions.