Friday, March 13, 2015

Cancer

Cancer symbol is a crab and falls from June 21st to July 22nd.  According to mythology In the myth, Hera sends the crab to distract Hercules while the hero is fighting the Lernaean Hydra, the serpent-like beast with many heads and poisonous breath, represented by Hydra constellation. When the crab tries to kill Hercules, the story goes, Hercules kicks it all the way to the stars.
In another version, the crab gets crushed instead and Hera, a sworn enemy of Hercules, places it in the sky for its efforts.
However, she places the crab in a region of the sky that has no bright stars, because despite its efforts, the crab was not successful in accomplishing the task. Cancer does not have any stars brighter than fourth magnitude.





Info from costellation-guide.com
picture from astrologyclub.org

5 comments:

  1. Very intriguing story, I have never been that familiar with mythology except for some of the stories I've heard in my astronomy class about them. Always thought it was a cool topic to speculate the origins of our stars.

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  2. I'm a cancer, and I had no idea that this story existed! Sweet!

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  3. My Zodiac sign is cancer. All I had ever know about it was that the sign was a crab. Interesting to hear some background information.

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  4. That is an interesting story, as many different times as I had heard the hercule story told by many different people; I had never heard this before.

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