60 Fun Facts About Cancer Zodiac Sign

What animal represents the zodiac sign Cancer?

Some depictions swap in a lobster, crayfish, scarab beetle or turtle, and the Swedish name for the sign literally means crayfish.

Cancer is which sign in the order of the zodiac?

It follows Gemini and precedes Leo, and the Sun enters it at the northern summer solstice.

Which celestial body rules the sign of Cancer?

Renaissance astrologers linked the sign to the lunar goddesses Luna and Diana for the same reason.

Cancer belongs to which classical element?

It shares the water trigon with Scorpio and Pisces.

What is Cancer's modality in astrology?

Cardinal signs begin each season, and Cancer opens summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Which sign sits opposite Cancer on the zodiac wheel?

The two also name the Earth's two tropics, the northern and southern limits of the overhead Sun.

Under the tropical zodiac the Sun is in Cancer from about June 21 until roughly which date?

Astronomically the Sun does not actually enter the constellation until around July 20 because of precession.

Cancer spans which degrees of celestial longitude?

Each of the twelve signs takes up exactly 30 degrees of the ecliptic.

Cancer is one of the six signs of which polarity?

The even-numbered signs, which make up the earth and water triplicities, are the negative or receptive ones.

Which planet is traditionally said to be exalted in Cancer?

Exaltation was compared to the dignity of an honoured guest, one step below rulership.

Because of the word's link to the disease, some astrologers call people born under Cancer what?

The nickname comes from the sign's lunar ruler.

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

In Mesopotamia it was a turtle; in each case the animal was seen as pushing the Sun across the sky at the solstice.

The Swedish name for the sign, 'kraftan', means what?

Dutch and Afrikaans go with 'kreeft' and 'kreef', meaning lobster; a 1488 Latin translation also drew it as a large crayfish.

What is the sign of Cancer called in Hindu astrology?

Sanskrit shares an ancestor with Greek, and Karka and Karkata are cousins of the Greek Karkinos.

The word 'Cancer' comes from an Indo-European root with what meaning?

Latin cancer is simply the generic word for crab.

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

Hera sent the crab to distract him by nipping at his feet; he crushed it and carried on.

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

She was Heracles' lifelong enemy and rewarded the crab's loyal, if useless, effort; in Roman tellings it is Juno.

How did Heracles kill the giant crab?

The crab had been biting his feet with its claws to throw him off balance during the fight.

The Hydra fight in which the crab appears was which of Heracles' twelve labours?

Eurystheus refused to count it because Heracles had help from his nephew Iolaus in cauterising the necks.

Which Roman physician translated the Greek 'karkinos' into Latin as 'cancer'?

Hippocrates had used karkinos for tumours because their spreading lesions reminded him of a crab.

Which two constellations flank Cancer along the zodiac?

Lynx lies to the north, Hydra to the south and Canis Minor to the southwest.

How does Cancer rank for brightness among the zodiac constellations?

Only two of its stars are brighter than fourth magnitude, and under city skies it disappears completely.

What is the brightest star in Cancer?

An orange giant about 50 times the Sun's diameter, it shines at only magnitude 3.5.

The star name Al Tarf translates from Arabic as what?

The IAU formally approved the shortened name Tarf in June 2018.

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

It is actually a quadruple system: two near-identical white stars orbited by a pair of small red dwarfs.

Delta Cancri holds the record for the longest stellar name, 'Arkushanangarushashutu'. What does it mean?

Its everyday name, Asellus Australis, means 'southern donkey', and it points the way to X Cancri, the reddest star in the sky.

The stars Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis represent what?

The Greeks and Romans saw them feeding from a manger, the fuzzy cluster between them.

In myth, which god and his tutor rode the two animals represented by the Aselli into battle against the Titans?

The donkeys' braying was said to have terrified the Titans.

What does 'Praesepe', the Latin name for Messier 44, mean?

Hipparchus called it Nephelion, 'little cloud', and Aratus called it Achlus, 'little mist'.

How many stars did Galileo resolve in the Beehive Cluster with his telescope in 1609?

Ptolemy had listed it as 'the nebulous mass in the breast of Cancer'; by the 2020s about 1,010 members were known.

How did Ptolemy describe the Beehive Cluster in the Almagest?

It was one of seven 'nebulae' in his catalogue, only four of which are real objects.

Ancient Chinese astronomers saw the Beehive Cluster as what?

They likened it to a cloud of pollen blown from willow catkins, and also called it the 'Exhalation of Piled-up Corpses'.

Roughly how far away is the Beehive Cluster?

It spans 1.5 square degrees of sky, three times the area of the full Moon.

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

Both are around 600 million years old and contain red giants and white dwarfs.

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

His atlas was the Uranometria; the letter Epsilon he gave the cluster now belongs to its brightest star.

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

Estimates run from 3.2 to 5 billion years, and its many Sun-like stars once led astronomers to wonder if the Sun was born there.

55 Cancri, a star in Cancer 41 light-years away, was given what proper name by the IAU in 2015?

Its planets were named Galileo, Brahe, Lipperhey, Janssen and Harriot after a public vote.

55 Cancri A was the first star known to host how many planets?

The innermost, 55 Cancri Ae, is a super-Earth that whips round its star in under 18 hours.

55 Cancri A is classed as a rare kind of star because it is unusually rich in what?

It has 186% of the Sun's iron abundance, earning the label 'super metal-rich'.

OJ 287, 3.5 billion light-years away in Cancer, holds one of the largest known examples of what?

Its central black hole weighs about 18 billion solar masses and produces outbursts traceable on photographic plates back to 1891.

What is the three-letter IAU abbreviation for the constellation Cancer?

The abbreviations were adopted in 1922; the constellation ranks 31st of 88 in size.

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

That is when the crab rides highest in the evening sky for northern observers.

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

That happens on the June solstice; the line currently sits at about 23.44 degrees north and drifts south by around 15 metres a year.

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

The tropic was named in the last centuries BC when the solstice Sun really did sit in the crab.

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

Member states are not obliged to defend territory south of the line, which is why the Falklands were never covered.

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

He was alluding to the constellation's faintness and to its being visible all night in midwinter.

Which naturalist in 1899 called Cancer 'the most inconspicuous figure in the zodiac'?

His book Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning is still the standard source on old constellation names.

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

The errors in existing tables it revealed pushed Brahe to begin his own programme of precise measurements.

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

Turtles appear regularly on Babylonian boundary stones, and no conventional crab has been found on any of them.

Babylonian astronomers placed the start of Cancer at which star when they fixed the zodiac?

They called it the 'Rear Twin Star', and the zodiac itself was introduced within a few years of 401 BC.

Because of Earth's orbital eccentricity, the Sun spends longer in Cancer than any other sign. About how long?

Capricorn is the shortest at about 29.4 days; the average is one twelfth of a year, 30.43 days.

On the cathedrals of Chartres and Amiens, the zodiac sign of Cancer is carved as what?

At Saint-Denis and Issoire, by contrast, the sign appears as a crayfish.

Which Spanish Golden Age painter's Hercules and the Hydra, showing the crab, hangs in the Prado?

The 1634 canvas was inspired by an engraving by Cornelis Cort.

What name, meaning shore-inhabiting, did the Roman writers Manilius and Ovid give the constellation?

Cicero preferred Nepa, a word that could mean crab, lobster or scorpion.

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

Both represent the Moon, Cancer's ruling planet; Vasari's Chamber of Fortune fresco shows Diana holding the moon with a crab.

In Giovanni Maria Falconetto's 1517 painting, Cancer is shown as the guardian of which city?

Agostino di Duccio's 1450 sculpture View of Rimini Under the Sign of Cancer is another Renaissance treatment.

How does the constellation Cancer rank in size among the 88 constellations?

It covers 506 square degrees, about 0.921% of the sky, within boundaries drawn by Eugène Delporte in 1930.

How many stars brighter than magnitude 6.5 lie within Cancer's borders?

Only two of them are brighter than fourth magnitude, which is why the constellation vanishes under city skies.

Iota Cancri now bears the proper name Yuyu, taken from a constellation of which culture?

The wide double star has a yellow bright-giant primary about 330 light-years away.

In Chinese astronomy, the stars of Cancer lie within which of the four symbolic regions of the sky?

Zeta Cancri, called Tegmine or 'the shell', is a system of at least four stars 82 light-years away.