Cancer Constellation and the crab Hera sent to die | ASTRONOMIKA TV
Chinese astronomers, ancient Egyptians and the Greeks all looked at the same patch of sky. Not one of them saw the same thing.
By Juan Pablo Martín | ASTRONOMIKA TV | May 2026
The Cancer constellation is the faintest in the zodiac, but it hides one of the richest stories in all of astronomy.
Hera, queen of Olympus, immortalizing the most useless and loyal crab in all of Greek mythology. Consolation prize included.
Some constellations demand attention. Orion with his belt of three bright stars, Scorpius with its curved tail, Leo with its regal sickle. And then there is Cancer, the constellation that barely shows up, squeezed between Gemini and Leo like someone who snuck into a photo without being invited. Faint to the point of near-invisibility, its stars are so dim they vanish at the first hint of city light.
And yet Cancer hides one of the zodiac’s richest stories. A kamikaze crab, a god of wine with his permanently drunk mentor, two donkeys that won a war by accident, a Chinese kingdom of the dead, and the Egyptian god who defeats death every single morning. All of it crammed into the darkest corner of the zodiac.
Hera’s Suicidal Crab
There is an unwritten rule in Greek mythology: if Hera sends you to do something, you are probably not going to make it. The Olympian gods had armies, lightning bolts and eternity to plan their vengeance. But Hera had something far more dangerous: infinite grudge and an obsessive need to destroy every illegitimate child of Zeus. And Zeus, it must be said, was the kind of god who could not pass through a village without leaving at least one demigod behind. His children were scattered across Greece like souvenirs from his travels. Hera knew every single one of them. And she had something in store for every single one.
Hera on her throne, flanked by her peacocks. That expression is not satisfaction. That is someone who has been refining her list of unfinished business for centuries.
At the top of her list was Heracles, which is the Greek name for the hero the Romans later rebranded as Hercules when, true to form, they borrowed the entire Greek pantheon and changed all the names. Heracles was born with the misfortune of being exactly what Hera despised most: living proof that her husband could not keep still. Son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene, he arrived in the world already marked. As an infant Hera tried to kill him by sending serpents into his crib. It did not work. Heracles strangled them before he could walk. The pattern was set from that moment: Hera schemes, Heracles survives, Hera accumulates more fury.
Years later, the moment Hera had been waiting for arrived. The gods decreed that Heracles must atone for his crimes by completing twelve impossible labors. The second was to kill the Lernaean Hydra, a nine-headed serpent that grew two new heads for every one that was cut off. A monster designed specifically to be unkillable. The perfect assignment for the man you want dead.
Heracles and the Lernaean Hydra. His nephew Iolaus stands ready with a torch in the background. Someone else was watching from the swamp, waiting for the right moment.
Heracles arrived at the battle with his nephew Iolaus. The fight was brutal: every severed head produced two more, the swamp reeked of venom, and the hero was finally finding his rhythm when Hera, watching from Olympus, made an executive decision. If Heracles was going to win anyway, she could at least make things difficult. So she dispatched her secret agent: a giant crab with orders to pinch the hero’s foot and throw him off balance at the critical moment.
What followed was the shortest and most pointless mission in the history of Greek mythology.
Hera’s secret agent, fully committed to the mission. The size difference between the crab and the foot it is attacking tells you everything you need to know about how this ends.
The crab emerged from the swamp, located Heracles’ foot and pinched it with the full conviction of a soldier following orders. Heracles, without even bothering to look down, crushed it. One step. No drama, no struggle, no glory. The crab died doing exactly what it had been asked to do, in total anonymity, flattened under the heel of the strongest man in the world.
Hera, who despite everything had a peculiar code of honor, acknowledged the gesture. The crab had obeyed. It had died trying. That deserved a reward. She picked it up and threw it into the sky, where it was immortalized forever as the constellation Cancer.
Immortality. A cosmic consolation prize.
Although you have to read the fine print: Hera placed it in the darkest, most forgotten corner of the entire zodiac, surrounded by stars so faint the constellation practically disappears at any hint of light pollution. It is the hardest zodiac constellation to see with the naked eye. Immortality, yes. But invisible. Even in her generous moments, Hera could not help being Hera.
Older versions of this story predate Greece entirely. The Babylonians knew this region of the sky thousands of years earlier and called it Allul, a water creature whose exact nature, crab, turtle or river monster, was never entirely clear. The Greeks likely borrowed the constellation and simply added their own drama on top. Which, when you think about it, was exactly what they did with everything.
But there is another story hiding inside Cancer. One the Greeks told with far more enthusiasm, because it has all the right ingredients: a wandering god, a permanently drunk mentor, two donkeys, and one of the most ridiculous military victories in cosmic history.
The Donkeys That Won a War by Braying
To understand why two stars in the Cancer constellation are named “the northern donkey” and “the southern donkey,” you first need to talk about Dionysus. And to talk about Dionysus you have to start at the beginning, which in his case is fairly complicated.
Dionysus was the god of wine, ecstasy and creative chaos. Son of Zeus, naturally, because Zeus never missed an opportunity. His mother was Semele, a mortal princess who was struck dead by Zeus’s divine glory before Dionysus could be born. The infant was rescued, sewn into his father’s thigh to complete his gestation, and eventually handed off to the nymphs of Mount Nysa to be raised far from Hera’s radar. Who, as we have already established, found everyone eventually.
Hera found him. She sent madness his way, her favorite weapon against Zeus’s children. Dionysus wandered the world for years in a state of divine delirium, crossing Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor, spreading the cult of wine and accumulating a retinue of followers as peculiar as himself. The most beloved among them was Silenus.
Dionysus leading the charge with his cup raised, the retinue in full chaos behind him. According to unconfirmed sources, Silenus had stepped away to use the facilities and missed the photo entirely.
Silenus was Dionysus’s tutor, mentor, guardian and lifelong companion. He was also, according to the Greeks, the living embodiment of intoxication itself: the closest any civilization has come to giving drunkenness a name, a face and a belly. He was old, he was enormously fat, and he possessed that irregular wisdom that only comes from having lived too long and drunk even longer. He was never seen sober and never seen on foot: Silenus always rode a donkey because his legs, at best, were an unreliable proposal. The donkey endured everything with the resignation of a creature that has accepted its fate.
Then came the Gigantomachy, the epic war between the Olympian gods and the Giants, primordial creatures born from the blood of Uranus who threatened to tear down the order of the cosmos. Every god was called to battle. Every god, including Dionysus and his retinue, who showed up riding donkeys, with the enthusiasm of people who were probably not in the best condition to assess the danger.
The army had to cross a swamp to reach the front lines. Dionysus, Silenus and the rest climbed onto their donkeys to keep their feet dry, which was precisely the level of tactical planning you would expect from that group. What the sources do not specify, but logic strongly suggests, is what state the donkeys were in by that point in the night. Because a retinue led by the god of wine and the living spirit of intoxication, crossing a swamp in the dark on their way to a war, is not the kind of expedition where anyone worries about the sobriety of the mounts.
And then the donkeys brayed.
This requires a moment of reflection. Everyone has heard a donkey bray. It is not frightening. At best it is funny. But there is a fundamental difference between the bray of an ordinary donkey and the bray of a donkey that has spent the night absorbing the fumes of the most chaotic retinue on Olympus. A sober donkey produces a perfectly recognizable sound. A donkey that has been marinating in that particular atmosphere produces something else entirely: a noise nature should not permit, with no name in any known language, and that coming out of nowhere in the darkness of a swamp could very reasonably sound like the end of the world.
Left side: the cause. Right side: the effect. In between, the darkness that separated the two most mismatched armies in cosmic history. The Giants never saw the donkeys. They only heard them.
The Giants, primordial creatures that had existed since before the order of the cosmos, had never heard anything like it. They fled in a panic.
The gods won the battle. Not through strategy, not through strength, not through Zeus and his lightning bolts. They won because two donkeys, under circumstances nobody bothered to document too carefully, produced the most terrifying sound the Giants had ever heard in their eternal existence. The official story says they simply brayed. But the official story, in this case, is probably leaving something out.
Dionysus, grateful in a way few gods ever managed to be, immortalized the two donkeys in the sky. They are still there: Asellus Borealis, the northern donkey, and Asellus Australis, the southern donkey, flanking M44 on either side. The Greeks called that cluster Phatne, the Manger, because the image makes perfect sense: two donkeys eating forever from a feeding trough made of stars. The Latin name became Praesepe, meaning exactly the same thing. Today we know it as the Beehive Cluster, because when Galileo looked at it through his telescope in 1609 and resolved forty stars where there had only been a haze, the image reminded him of a swarm of bees. Two names for the same object: the Manger when we talk about myth, the Beehive when we talk about science. In this article we use both, because both tell something true.
China and Egypt: Death and Rebirth in the Same Sky
The Greek crab has been hogging the spotlight for centuries. But while the Greeks saw a kamikaze crustacean and a manger full of drunk donkeys, on the other side of the world two civilizations looked at exactly the same patch of sky and saw something radically different. One saw the kingdom of the dead. The other saw the gateway to eternal life.
China: The Sky of Ghosts
A Chinese imperial astronomer and his map of the twenty-eight lunar mansions. Centuries of systematic sky observation recorded on silk and parchment. What they saw in this region of the zodiac was anything but poetic.
Ancient Chinese astronomers divided the sky into twenty-eight lunar mansions, each with its own name, its own meaning and its own weight in the order of the cosmos. The twenty-third mansion, the one that corresponds to the region we now call Cancer, was named Guǐ.
Guǐ means ghosts. Spirits of the dead, to be precise.
The four stars surrounding M44, the same ones the Greeks would later turn into a manger with two donkeys, formed for the Chinese the figure of a specter: a bodiless presence drifting through the darkness of the sky. This was not decorative metaphor or poetic naming. In Chinese cosmology, Guǐ was literally the place where the spirits of ancestors resided, an open window between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.
And at the center of that ghostly figure sat the Beehive Cluster.
The Chinese called the cluster Jīshī, which translates as “pile of corpses” or “accumulated bodies.” A thousand stars packed into a single point of sky, seen from Earth as a shapeless hazy smudge, and Chinese astronomers saw exactly what the image suggested: a nameless heap of souls drifting through eternity. The complete formation, the four ghost stars plus the cluster of corpses at the center, depicted a ghost being carried in a sedan chair. They called it Yugui: the Ghost Wagon.
The Yugui, the Ghost Wagon, carrying an ancestral spirit across the night sky. Chinese astronomers looked at the same stars as the Greeks and saw a funeral procession.
The contrast with Greece could not be sharper. The Greeks put a manger there. The Chinese put a funeral procession.
And yet both were looking at exactly the same stars, on the same kind of night, with the same human eyes trying to make sense of the same indifferent universe. That one saw a feeding trough and the other saw a cortege of the dead says more about those two civilizations than any history book.
Egypt: The Beetle That Carries the Sun
A few thousand miles west of Babylon, along the banks of the Nile, the ancient Egyptians also knew this corner of the sky. And what they saw there had nothing to do with crabs, donkeys or ghosts.
They saw a scarab beetle.
Specifically, they saw Khepri, the scarab god, one of the forms the sun took in its eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Khepri was the dawn sun, the star that rose each morning from the underworld after dying the night before. His name in ancient Egyptian comes from the verb kheper, meaning “to become,” “to transform,” “to exist again.” Khepri was not merely a deity. He was the concept of resurrection made visible.
Khepri pushing the solar disk across the Nile horizon at dawn. What the dung beetle does with a ball of earth, Khepri does with the sun. Death, transformation and rebirth in a single gesture.
The connection to the scarab beetle was not arbitrary. The Egyptians watched dung beetles pushing their balls of earth across the ground and saw in that motion the perfect image of the sun being rolled across the sky each morning. Just as the beetle rolled its sphere along the earth, Khepri rolled the solar disk through the heavens. And inside that ball of dung, the beetle deposited its eggs, and from the humblest of materials, new life emerged. Death, transformation, rebirth. The entire cycle of the universe summarized in an insect pushing a ball of dirt.
The scarab became one of the most powerful symbols in ancient Egypt. The scarab amulets, the heart scarabs placed on the chests of mummies, the royal seals carved in stone, all carried the same promise: what dies can exist again.
The heart scarab, carved from lapis lazuli, placed over the chest of the mummy. Khepri’s promise made tangible: what dies at nightfall can exist again at dawn.
Consider the contrast. In the same patch of sky where the Greeks placed a crab that died crushed and forgotten, the Egyptians placed the god of eternal resurrection. Where Hera put the symbol of pointless death, Egypt put the symbol that death is never the end.
Same stars. Two ideas that could not be further apart.
And perhaps the most remarkable detail of all: Cancer spent centuries at the highest point of the zodiac, the position where the sun reached its maximum height at the summer solstice. For the Egyptians, that moment was sacred. The sun at its peak, in the sky of the scarab, pushing the celestial vault with all its force. Khepri at the height of his glory.
The Greeks put a crushed crab there. The Egyptians put the god who defeats death every morning.
The difference in perspective, it must be said, is considerable.
Without coordinating, without knowing each other existed, three civilizations built the complete cycle of human existence in the same handful of stars. The Greeks placed pointless death, the sacrifice nobody remembers. The Chinese placed the transit, the realm where the departed go. The Egyptians placed the promise that nothing ends completely, that what dies at nightfall can exist again at dawn. Life, death and resurrection, written into the darkest, most forgotten corner of the zodiac.
And flanking all that philosophical weight, eating quietly from their Manger of a thousand stars, two immortal donkeys that one night won a war without really understanding what was happening. Just like every hero, if we are being honest.
M44: A Thousand Suns in the Zodiac’s Back Yard
The Cancer constellation with the Beehive Cluster at its center and the two immortal donkeys flanking it. Asellus Australis to the south, Asellus Borealis to the north. Exactly where Dionysus put them. Image: Sky Guide App
All that mythology, all that cosmic drama of crushed crabs, floating ghosts, divine scarabs and donkeys of questionable sobriety, orbits around a real object. One you can see tonight if you know where to look and your sky is dark enough. And when you actually see it, when you truly see it, you understand why five different civilizations felt the need to invent a story for it.
The Beehive Cluster is about 577 light-years from Earth. To put that in perspective: traveling at the speed of light, the journey would take 577 years. The light you see tonight when you look at M44 left there when Christopher Columbus had not yet set sail from Palos de la Frontera. That light has been traveling since before the Americas were on any European map.
And what produces that light is approximately one thousand stars gravitationally bound to each other, moving together through space as if they were a single thing. A thousand suns. Most are smaller and dimmer than ours: red dwarfs burning with the quiet confidence of stars that know they will outlast everything else by billions of years. But the cluster also contains blue-white giants, young and voracious stars burning through their fuel at a reckless rate, blazing with an intensity that makes our Sun look like a birthday candle.
M44, the Beehive Cluster, in a real image. What Ptolemy called “the nebulous mass in the breast of Cancer” and Galileo resolved into forty stars through his telescope in 1609. Today we know there are approximately one thousand. Credit: NASA
The cluster is about 600 million years old. That sounds ancient until you remember the Sun is 4.5 billion years old. The Beehive is, in stellar terms, a teenager.
M44 covers an area of sky equivalent to three full moons placed side by side. It is one of the closest open clusters to Earth and contains more stars than most other clusters in its cosmic neighborhood.
M44 compared to three full moons in apparent size. The cluster spans the same angular width as the three moons combined. An enormous object that the naked eye barely registers as a smudge of light.
With a pair of Celestron Cometron 7×50 binoculars on a moonless night far from the city, the Beehive becomes one of the most accessible spectacles in the sky: dozens of stars resolved all at once where before there was only a hazy smudge, arranged in patterns that the human eye inevitably tries to turn into shapes. The Greeks saw a manger. You will see whatever your brain decides to invent that night.
Through the NexStar 8SE the experience shifts in scale. The cluster is so large that at medium magnification it starts to spill out of the field of view, so the best approach is low power and letting the stars fill the eyepiece. Under dark skies, the blue-white stars at the cluster’s core contrast with the orange ones at the edges in a way the human eye enjoys more than any camera.
And if you want to bring something home, the Seestar S50 captures the Beehive with context and color in minutes: the full cluster in wide field, the brightest stars saturated with blue and white, the faintest ones emerging from the background as if the sky were full of luminous dust. Which, essentially, it is.
The Donkeys Have Their Own Story
Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis, Dionysus’s two immortal donkeys, are not just mythological characters. They are real stars with their own physical histories.
Asellus Australis, the southern donkey, is an orange giant about 136 light-years away. Its Babylonian name, Arkushanangarushashutu, is the longest star name known in any language. It translates as “the southeast star in the Crab.” The Babylonians, it must be said, had no interest in poetry.
Asellus Borealis, the northern donkey, is a white A-type star about 181 light-years away. Younger, hotter, more modest in name but equally present in the sky.
Both flank the Beehive exactly as they have done since the Greeks decided that arrangement made sense. And if on a dark night you point a pair of binoculars toward that region of the sky, you will find them exactly where mythology placed them: one on each side of the Manger, as if they were still eating.
The Constellation That Almost Does Not Exist
Cancer holds the dubious distinction of being the hardest zodiac constellation to see. Its brightest star, Tarf, barely reaches magnitude 3.5, which in practical terms means it vanishes completely under the light pollution of any medium-sized city. To find Cancer with the naked eye you need genuinely dark skies, the kind that are increasingly hard to come by.
There is a perfect irony in this. The constellation the ancients placed at the highest point of the zodiac, the position where the sun reached its maximum glory at the summer solstice, is today practically invisible to most of humanity. Hera chose her corner well.
The best time to look for it is February through May in the northern hemisphere, when Cancer reaches its highest point in the night sky. In the southern hemisphere, August through November. In both cases, look for the empty gap between the bright constellations Gemini to the west and Leo to the east. Cancer lives in that gap, quiet and almost invisible, as if the zodiac had left a blank space that someone filled in reluctantly.
And at the center of that nearly empty space, invisible to the naked eye from most places where people live today, sits the Beehive Cluster. A thousand suns waiting for you to get far enough from the lights to see them.
For objects like the Beehive Cluster, sky darkness matters more than telescope aperture. Truly dark skies with modest binoculars will outperform any large instrument under light-polluted skies.
Cancer is the constellation nobody sees. The faintest in the zodiac, the most overlooked, the one that occupies the space between two bright neighbors like someone sitting between two celebrities in a photo. And yet it hides one of the richest star clusters in the nearby sky, a thousand suns packed at 577 light-years, flanked by two immortal donkeys and surrounded by more mythology per square degree than any other constellation in the zodiac.
A crab that died in a single footstep. Two donkeys that won a war without understanding it. A Chinese kingdom of the dead. The Egyptian god who defeats death every morning. All of it in a corner of the sky so dark that Hera chose it for exactly that reason.
If you want to see all of this with your own eyes, find us on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok as ASTRONOMIKA TV. Observation guides, stories like this one, and much more about the sky we all share.
Looking for the Beehive under a dark sky. With good binoculars and patience, a thousand suns appear where before there was only haze.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Cancer Constellation
What is the Cancer constellation?
Cancer is a zodiac constellation located between Gemini to the west and Leo to the east. Its name means crab in Latin and it is the faintest of the twelve zodiac constellations. Despite its low profile, it contains one of the richest and closest star clusters to Earth: M44, the Beehive Cluster.
Why is Cancer so hard to see in the night sky?
Because none of its stars exceed magnitude 3.5. Its brightest star, Tarf, is barely visible to the naked eye under ideal conditions and disappears entirely under light-polluted skies. Cancer is the faintest constellation in the entire zodiac.
What is the Beehive Cluster M44?
M44, also known as the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe, is an open star cluster of approximately one thousand stars located about 577 light-years from Earth. It is one of the closest star clusters to the Solar System and is roughly 600 million years old. To the naked eye it appears as a fuzzy patch of light; binoculars resolve it into dozens of individual stars.
How can I see M44 with binoculars?
Find the empty gap between Gemini and Leo. Cancer sits in that gap, and M44 sits at its heart. You need dark skies away from light pollution. With 7×50 binoculars on a moonless night, the Beehive Cluster transforms from a hazy smudge into a field of dozens of resolved stars. Dark skies matter more than magnification.
What are Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis?
They are the two stars flanking the Beehive Cluster in the sky. Their names mean the northern donkey and the southern donkey in Latin. In Greek mythology they represent the donkeys ridden by Dionysus and Silenus during the Gigantomachy, the war between the Olympian gods and the Giants. Their braying, under circumstances the sources prefer not to elaborate on, terrified the Giants and decided the outcome of the battle.
What did ancient Chinese astronomers see in the Cancer constellation?
In Chinese astronomy, the Cancer region corresponds to the lunar mansion Gui, meaning ghosts or spirits of the dead. The four stars surrounding M44 formed the figure of a specter, and the cluster itself was called Jishi, meaning pile of corpses. The whole formation was interpreted as a ghost being carried in a sedan chair, known as Yugui, the Ghost Wagon.
What did ancient Egyptians see in the Cancer constellation?
The ancient Egyptians associated this region of the sky with Khepri, the scarab beetle god, symbol of the rising sun and eternal resurrection. Khepri represented transformation and rebirth, the promise that what dies at nightfall can exist again at dawn. Where Greece placed a symbol of pointless death, Egypt placed the god who defeats death every morning.
When is the best time to see the Cancer constellation?
In the northern hemisphere, Cancer is most visible from February to May, when it reaches its highest point in the night sky. In the southern hemisphere, the best time is August through November. In both cases, look for the gap between the bright constellations Gemini and Leo: Cancer lives there, quiet and nearly invisible, with the Beehive Cluster shining at its center brighter than all its stars combined.
How many stars does the Beehive Cluster have?
M44 contains approximately one thousand gravitationally bound stars. Most are red dwarfs, small and long-lived. Around thirty percent are Sun-like stars, and the most visually striking are the blue-white giants at the cluster’s core. Five red giants and at least eleven white dwarfs are also part of the family.
Sources and Recommended Reading
Books
Ridpath, I. (2018). Star Tales. Lutterworth Press.
The most complete and accessible reference on stellar mythology in English. Ridpath documents the stories behind each constellation with academic rigor and clear prose. The Cancer section is the primary source for Eratosthenes’ account of the donkeys and the Gigantomachy.
Allen, R.H. (1963). Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning. Dover Publications. (Original edition 1899.)
The classic dictionary of star names. Indispensable for tracing the origin of names such as Asellus Borealis, Asellus Australis and Praesepe across Greek, Latin, Arabic and Babylonian cultures.
Digital Sources
NASA Science / Hubble Messier Catalog: Messier 44science.nasa.gov — Messier 44
Official technical data on M44 including distance, age, stellar composition and Hubble images. Primary source for all physical data about the cluster mentioned in this article.
Ridpath, I. Star Tales: Cancerianridpath.com — Star Tales: Cancer
Digital version of the Cancer chapter, with original sources from Eratosthenes and Ptolemy on the Praesepe cluster and the story of the donkeys in the Gigantomachy.
IAU: International Astronomical Union — Star Namesiau.org — Naming Stars
Official source for approved star names, including Asellus Borealis, Asellus Australis and Tarf.
Constellation Guide: Praesepe — Messier 44constellation-guide.com — Praesepe M44
Detailed technical data on M44 including magnitude, distance, dimensions and stellar composition.