How to Find the Constellation Cancer

The constellation of Cancer is a difficult one to recognize when you are looking right at it, so imagine how hard it is to find if you do not know anything about it. While this star grouping represented a giant crab to the ancient civilizations that named it, it looks nothing like a crustacean, resembling an upside-down "Y" if anything. To locate Cancer, you must find two more easily identifiable constellations, Ursa Major and Leo, and then use them as a roadmap to the crab.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

1. Search for Cancer in the spring months on a clear and moonless night. This is the optimal time to view this constellation. In the beginning of March, Cancer is overhead in much of the United States.

2. Locate the Big Dipper, part of the Ursa Major constellation. It is always to the north and you will easily recognize it by the seven stars that form a large ladle in the sky. Look closely at the two stars that form the part of the ladle's "bowl" closest to the "handle." You will use these to pinpoint Leo the Lion.

3. Follow an imaginary line downward from the star in the ladle where the bowl joins the handle through the lower one in the bowl beneath it. Extend the line through these two stars, on the left-hand side of the ladle's bowl, out into space and follow it with your eyes until you come to the first bright star. This is Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo.

4. Look above Regulus and you will see what appears to be a backwards question mark, a group of stars called the "sickle." Regulus would be the period beneath this celestial question mark. This group of stars constitutes the head and the shoulders of the heavenly lion.

5. Scan the area to the right of the sickle. This is where Cancer is located in the sky. The constellation is extremely dim, possessing not a single bright star. You may imagine it as a stick figure walking, but one that has no arms or head. Study this area with a pair of binoculars, though, and you will observe the "Beehive Cluster," an open cluster of over 300 stars so distant that it looks like a fuzzy spot to your unaided eyes.

References

• Evening Sky for the Month of March