This weekend, the Moon will be seen as a waxing crescent moving up the sky from the western horizon about an hour after sunset, where it will then appear much like 19th century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge described in his poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge wrote: The moving Moon went up the sky, / And nowhere did abide: / Softly she was going up, / And a star or two beside—
The apparent ‘stars’ beside the Moon this Saturday and Sunday will actually be a planet and a star. On Saturday, the Moon will appear just below the planet Jupiter, and on Sunday, the waxing crescent will appear with Jupiter to its left and the star Procyon to its right.
From this position between Procyon and Jupiter, the Moon will then move along in front of the faint region of stars that make up the constellation Cancer, the Crab.
According to ancient astrological tradition, the Moon has dominion over this region of the Crab from the belief that the Moon was located here when it was first created. Further, the Crab constellation was thought to govern the rib cage in the human being, given that the hard outer shell of the crab protects the soft inner organism of that creature, just as the rib cage of the human being protects the soft inner organism of heart and lung.
And just as heart and lung occupy the rhythmic center of the human being, there was something significant, if not mysterious, visible at the center of the Crab constellation. This is now known as the Beehive Cluster, which was for centuries the only universally recognized nebula distinguishable by ordinary vision.
It wasn’t until 1609, when the Italian astronomer Galileo first trained his telescope on this nebula that he was able to discern that it was actually a tight group of stars. Now referred to as an ‘open star cluster,’ this region in the Crab constellation is the nearest star cluster in our solar system.
By following the Moon through the sky this weekend and into next week, you can identify the region of Cancer and its star cluster.
