Queen's Personal Flag for New Zealand the same basic pattern used by queen across several other realms since the 1960s: it is the escutcheon of a country's coat of arms (e.g. the arms of New Zealand) in banner form defaced with a device taken from her personal flag (a blue roundel surrounded by a garland of roses encircling a crowned letter 'E', all in gold). The flag is divided into four quadrants: The first quadrant includes depicts four stars as representative of the Southern Cross constellation, as depicted on the national flag. The second quadrant consists of a golden fleece on a red field. The third
Crux the Coalsack Nebula. The stars within Crux were known to the Ancient Greeks, where Ptolemy regarded them as part of the constellation Centaurus. They were entirely visible as far north as Britain in the fourth millennium BC. However, the precession of the equinoxes gradually lowered the stars below the European horizon, and they were eventually forgotten by the inhabitants of northern latitudes. By 400 AD, most of the stars in the constellation we now call Crux never rose above the horizon of Athens. The 15th century Venetian navigator Alvise Cadamosto made note of what was probably the Southern Cross on