Description
The silver stars & silhouette of Cancer the crab are illustrated in this handmade block print. I printed an edition of eight prints, 7 inches by 10 inches (17.8 cm by 24.8 cm) on lovely, handmade, Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper with a deckle edge. The word Cancer & symbol ♋ appear at the bottom of the image. The lines linking the constellation appear in black-on-silver or silver-on-black as appropriate. There are two star clusters, shown as circles filled with stars. The Beehive Cluster (M44 in the Messier star catalogue) is inside the crab itself. The open star cluster M67 appears by the lower claw. Cancer is one of the dimest zodiac constellations (or those constellations which cross the ecliptic). If you imagined all celestial bodies we see in the night sky as mapped onto a sphere (the Celestial Sphere) around our Earth, the ecliptic would be the line you would draw to map the apparent path of the Sun through the various constellations. The ecliptic is marked as the dashed line in this print. Because of its dimness Cancer was often considered the "Dark Sign", quaintly described as black & without eyes. It has been recognized as various crustaceans by different peoples at different periods. I've shown it as a crab, which is most common today. The constellation overhead at a person's birth was thought to provide insight into their character & fate. Well into the Renaissance, medical doctors were expected to be trained in astrology, as it was deemed an important diagnostic tool. Though today, astronomy tells us that Sun now appears in the constellation Cancer from July 21 to August 9, the traditional dates which determine a Cancer 'sun sign' are from June 21 to July 21. Cancer Constellation Print in Silver On Black, Constellations Of The Zodiac Collection, Crab Star Map
