5 Dollars - Elizabeth II 4th Portrait - Northern Sky - Cygnus - Silver Domed

Part of the Royal Australian Mint's four-coin Northern Sky domed series, this piece uses pad printing — a technique borrowed from industrial manufacturing — to apply colour to the concave surface, a process that creates significant adhesion challenges on curved substrates that flat commemoratives never face. Cygnus, the swan constellation, sits along the Milky Way's northern edge and has been a navigational reference since antiquity, though it holds no particular significance to Australian indigenous astronomy, making this a decidedly northern-hemisphere subject for a southern-hemisphere mint.