“Regardless of what the coins depict, I think it is an extraordinarily beautiful set (referring to the twelve coin zodiac set) and shows delicate workmanship.” “In astrology, the Moon rules the sign of Cancer,” says Flannery. I ran a simulation using data from NASA/JPL/Horizons, and 1P/Halley would have been at Right Ascension 9 hours, 13’ 12’, Declination +24º 10’ on April 28 th, 141 CE in the adjacent constellation of Leo the Lion shinning at +1 st magnitude while the Moon was in Cancer at dusk.

He noted that while it’s tempting to assert that the dots on the shell of the Crab depict the open cluster Praesepe (Messier 44), Steve O’Meara also notes in a past Sky & Telescope column that individual stars in the cluster would be hard to discern with the naked eye.įlannery also pointed me toward another interesting possibility for the mystery star: the 141 CE apparition of Halley’s comet. I ran this idea past fellow amateur astronomer John Flannery, and he had some interesting ideas. Credit: Saiko/Wikimedia Commons 3.0 license. The base of the column of Antoninus Pius in Rome, depicting Pius and Faustina. Under one possible scenario, a court astrologer could have assigned significance to the conjunction of Jupiter with the Moon in Cancer, a portent that later moved a grieving Pius to commemorate the death of his wife, casting her as the Moon goddess Selene. We all remember the astrologer’s admonition to Julius Caesar to ‘beware the Ides of March,’ and astronomical historians from Kepler and Newton onward have gone broke trying to link the ‘star’ that guided astrologers to Bethlehem with a true astronomical phenomenon. Ancients watched the sky, noted what they saw and assigned import to them versus human and terrestrial affairs. Of course, the modern science of astronomy has its hoary roots in the archaic practice of astrology. The Moon occults Jupiter on June 4th, 140 CE. Not only did this occur in the reign of Antoninus Pius, but it would have been visible right before the death of his beloved wife Faustina the Elder in late 140 CE… perhaps the ancient coin commemorates her passing? Certainly there’s record of Pius’s devotion to Faustina, and his subsequent campaign to deify Faustina after her death. Dusk looking west from the Mediterranean region on the evening of June 4th, 140 CE. I did a search using the Occult 4.2 program and the planetarium program Stellarium (which takes in to account the ~26,000 year precession of the equinoxes and stellar proper motion over the centuries), and found one event that was especially intriguing: the dusk conjunction of the waxing crescent Moon and Jupiter on the evening of June 4 th 140 CE… in the sign of Cancer. Now, no bright star exists in Cancer I therefore suspected it was actually a bright planet, say, Jupiter or Venus. I began to wonder if this depicted a real astronomical event, visible from the Mediterranean region in the years before the coin was minted. The ancient coin also shows a bright ‘star’ near the Moon.

Coin stars near me