Bullets in a Flying Yo Yo Revolver

Are we bullets in a spinning cartridge?

Peas on a tilted turntable?

Or Fleas on the belly of a barrel rolling swan?

I have been obsessed with figuring out, being able to picture in my mind, where various stars are as we turn on our axis.  Actually, not so much stars, as the path of the Milky Way.  It sounds like our north pole is leading us around like the beak of a flying trumpet swan on the Orion Spur.  But this swan is a very athletic traveler who not only takes us around the carousel ride of the Milky Way, but at the same time revolves pretty much up and down around a small star, in a constant, perfectly controlled barrel roll.  The formation and pattern of motions is amazing in general, but, for me, nearly impossible to picture specifically.  

For instance, I have the general idea that at one point in every revolution we are like fleas on the swan’s belly, facing into the middle of the galaxy, then about 6 hours later facing toward the south pole of the galaxy.  What is that?  I don't know, but they all say it is in the direction of the constellation Sculptor.  Then another 6 hours, or quarter of a turn later we are facing out and see Betelgeuse around the level of the equator. 

It is hard to imagine flying around the Milky Way while revolving up and down around the Sun like bullets in the cartridge of a yo yo revolver.  We’ve gone from fleas on the belly of a barrel rolling swan to bullets in a yo yo revolver, and now I wonder if I could picture Earth as a pea on a giant sea of vinyl statically held to a turntable inclined almost on its side.  That is more what it is like.  The fastest motion seems like standing still to us.  The turntable tilted almost on its side would be rushing around the rim of the galaxy much faster than the record would be spinning on the felt, but because our little felt cloud is so far from all the other turntables, millions of them with stars in the middle, more or less…so we’re spinning on a tilted turntable and our turntable is ….I’m dizzy.

Because we are so far from the next nearest turntable, so far, light years away, we can’t tell we are racing to meet them faster than we are revolving in our cartridge as our whole cartridge revolves around the felt platform of the tilted turntable.  

It has been a week or two since I wrote the above paragraphs.  Wednesday I cleaned a house with a globe (about 16inch diameter, tilted on a wooden base) and got down to business.  I took the dog bed and propped it at an angle against the footboard of the customer’s bed (Thanks Rick!)—it just buckled like a rag doll, so I dumped the little bit of laundry out of a round laundry basket and turned that upside down and set it as a support for the tilted dog bed.  A really sweet dog used to sleep on that bed, but she died a few months back.  Now the bed stood at a nice 60 degree angle above the floor more or less.  So the carpeted floor was the plane of the galaxy (Milky Way, Milky Way, Milky Way bar!) and the tilted round bed was the plane of the solar system.

Now I was ready for Earth.  I had already taken the globe from its spot on the shelf so it was right beside my little make believe galaxy on the floor.  I positioned the base so the north pole was tilted to the outside of the solar system, oops! galaxy, and went from there.

It worked.  

 I’ve been studying pictures from around the internet.  There are no videos and very few images, I will leave 2 links that helped me at the end of this post.  Without those folks from around the world, people just like me, trying to solve a mystery that really ought to be common knowledge, and then taking the trouble to help others figure it out, I never would have gotten this far. 

I’ve done a bunch of other exploring in the process of trying to get a more godlike view in my mind of a flea on a barrel rolling swan’s belly.  This flea’s eye view is for the birds.  

It has meant avoiding conversation with my new friends on the Astrodienst forum, and that has worried me.  A woman from Romania sent me a message hoping all was well with me and it felt like someone had passed me a message in the middle of final exams.  I dared not disturb my studies, but I was so happy to hear from someone and have an excuse to make a quick bit of conversation!

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Yesterday near the end of this period, I love Mercury retros, but Mercury retro in Gemini literally rules, the only thing that might compare would be Mercury overtaking the Sun in Virgo, my sister called.  She was so excited a couple of months ago when she finally passed the entrance exam to go to nursing school.  I sent congratulations when she got the good news but did not say congratulations on having knocked on the door and being granted entrance to hell.  She had broken down into tears in the math lab struggling with equations about the slope of a line.  Remember those?  Y=mx+b?  What does this have to do with advocating for people in their last months of life?  Supporting families in crisis?  She had solved an equation for y but it came out –y=-7.  She went over and over the process thinking she had made an error.  Finally the teacher came around and explained she had done everything correctly, she just needed to change the negatives on both sides of the equation to positive.  And voila!

My sister and I go wayyyy back, as you can imagine.  I was 8 years old when she arrived from Prince Edward Island, Canada.  She was like an angel given to me by some great giver.  I did not want to share her with the rest of the family.  She was mine.  Now she can’t get me to come to visit her.  But she knows she can call any time.  And she knows how much I love math.  I used to try to teach her algebra when she was in elementary school because I thought it was so fun and amazing.  Poor girl.  I did worse things than that even.  

“You know what’s happening when you take those two negatives away?  You’re not just waving a magic wand.  You are actually multiplying both sides by negative 1.  That’s the cool thing about equations, that equal sign is like the middle point of a balance scale, you can do anything you want to one side as long as you do the same thing to the other side.” 

“It did sound like a magic wand.  Just making them disappear.”

“They aren’t disappearing.  When you multiply a negative by a negative you get a positive, but we just don’t write the positive.”

And now I’m thinking about how invisible the positive is in life.  Compared to the negative.  Imagine what life would be like if we wrote a plus sign next to every positive number.  It would be like walking through a sea of drugstore greeting cards.  But the negative always gets written down.  We have a hard time learning how to handle it, in the beginning, but once we get the hang of that other end of the number line, that mirror side, it gets more interesting, we can do more tricks and solve more problems.  

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I didn’t tell her about the Sun catching up to Mars this week.  Her son is a Gemini that has disappeared from Grandmom’s  and called a few hours later from the neighbor’s house.  Noone home there.  He just walked in and found something interesting to play with.  In kindergarten he had to be watched carefully because he had a habit of leaving the class and going down the hall to visit his sister.  The Moon was full when he was born.  The fulfillment of Gemini’s curious spirit is that ambling Sagittarian soul.  It is such a comfort for her to hear these things.  To be able to tell her how high we are in our daily revolution when we see a planet in the sign Sagittarius.  How we are reaching the top of the mountain.  To help her see beyond the centuries of misinformation of what the term Sagittarius refers to in the physical world.  That it is not just a cultural symbol, not a bunch stars with lines drawn between them like pages in dot to dot coloring books.  It really is the arrow following an arc to the top.  

Her story of the tear filled struggle learning to manipulate negative numbers reminded me how hard it is for us to learn each little new concept we master.  As soon as we learn it, it becomes easy.  But before we focus our attention, our will, before we turn away from other thoughts and activities, it is a sealed can we cannot get into.  The light inside is absolutely hidden until attention is absolutely given.  My sister is determined to learn these math skills. 

But back to my very brief period of silence, and the Milky Way; I don’t quite have it in my mind the way I want it, but the picture is coming in more strongly every day.  Right before Mercury went retro I was working on a page displaying my services and related fees.  Somewhere in there I just became completely obsessed with being able to imagine our movement in the lactic path to …. nowhere I guess.  Oh well.  Astronomers like to say that, we’re going nowhere on the way to annihilation.  

But in the meantime, as an astrologer, my job is to help people get oriented in the bodies we currently inhabit, and Earth in the Milky Way was one last meditation I wanted to have some experience with before hanging out a shingle. 

 Our Sky Astrology- Affordable Journeys to Heaven (where you can hobnob with the stars on the milky path to nowhere!)

I circled Sun nearly caught up with Mars.  Look at Venus in Leo (it was about to come up when I started writing this morning)—it is almost caught up with Jupiter!

Here are links to some sites that helped me picture our journey on the belly of the electron swan. Physics Forum 

Follow the answers till you get to the gif image of Sun orbiting the tilted solar system

 

A more detailed image of the tilted solar system is down the linked RASC Calgary Center page a ways.

An amateur astronomy husband and wife team in South Africa posted a helpful screenshot from Stellarium.  I can't find their blog so here is a screenshot similar to the one they posted.  

Presto digito!

What messages did the little cupid bring you while it was inside the castle mote?