Sunday, February 23, 2014

It's Getting Warm up Here: Sun in Pisces



Today is February 23 and the Sun is almost to the 5th degree of Pisces- a poetic way of locating its position from the top half of Earth.


On January 1 we were in the 10th degree of Capricorn, lined up between Jupiter at the top of the solar system diagram and Pluto way down at the bottom.  Now, less than two months later, Earth has moved into the position where it is roasting more of its side than its feet.  Since Raleigh is in the Northern half of the globe that means we are getting a better share of Sun’s photons and other signals.

The above diagram of the solar system is not to scale and I left our closest siblings out of the picture.  We are pretending they are not related to us and only following the planets that make really big circles. 


I talked about Mars slowing down last week, click on the shaded text for a link to that post.  We are about to pass through the straights of Mars/Sun, then Saturn/Sun.  In the astrology chart above, since Earth is at the center, things look a bit different: we see the Sun on one side, approaching opposition to Mars first and then Saturn.  

See Neptune on the right side of the first diagram?  In the astrology chart the planet of generational vision appears right beside the Sun.  We will see the Sun leave Pisces in less than a month, but Neptune won’t enter Aries (the sign after Pisces) until 2025.  How many babies will be born with Neptune in Pisces?  We haven’t had babies born with Neptune in Pisces since the start of the Civil War.

At 5:53 am Raleigh was almost to the top of her daily spin round Earth’s axis.   When we are so close to the top that we could just about shoot an arrow over the curve of the Earth, it is called Sagittarius.  What will those cave dwellers think of next?!

Now…another first for this blog….Today I am including a little diagram of where we saw the planets in the actual sky from Raleigh at 5:53am.  You can see the little house and the steps where the person came out their door facing North and walked around to the South and looked up.  


Along with a few distant stars that were bright enough to outshine city lights, Venus was coming up in the east, the moon was just east of due south and then Saturn and Mars were west of south.  That’s a close up view so you can’t see the whole line of the ecliptic, which is not exactly imaginary and not exactly real- I guess you would call it the yellow brick road the planets follow through the sky.  Sometimes they go a little above it and sometimes a little below.  This morning they were all a little above it.

The main diagram, with the house and bug eyed planet gazer, shows a close-up view of the sky, so you can’t see where the ecliptic descends on the horizon.  The last diagram shows things from a wider view so you can see how the ecliptic was intersecting the horizon at that moment.


Yes, the ecliptic is skewed to the west, not centered as the hands marching around the perfect circle of the clock.  But what does it meannnn?????   It means that we are children of the universe and we have a right to know our real place in it.