Microscope to River

Going from chart to ephemeris is like looking at a drop of water under a microscope and then going down to the river to see the running body of water where the sample was extracted. 

The chart fixes a moment in time/space and magnifies it.  Today I am anticipating the moment Mars overtakes nearly stationary Mercury tomorrow morning.  It will be 5:37am in Raleigh.  The last image in this post shows a chart from Astrodienst for that time and place on our planet.  Much of the information in the chart can be found in the Sept 3 row of the 2017 ephemeris.  Before the chart there are 2 screenshots of the Sept 2017 section of the ephemeris (also free from Astrodienst).  The first shot is a wide view showing the dates and location of Sun, Moon and Mercury at midnight UT. 

UT is the 21st century version of Greenwich Mean Time.  In the process of going from coordinating train schedules to coordinating cell phones, the time engineers have made a few upgrades.  For our purposes though, it is safe to think of Universl Time as GMT.

The 2nd shot zooms in on the Mercury -Mars columns.  You will have to count the dates from Fri Sept 1 at the top to Tues Sept 5 when Mercury turns from retro to direct.  You can see that the numbers are decreasing from 29degrees47minutes to 29degrees16min Sept 1.  They decrease a bit less Sept 2 from 29d16m to 28d51m.  In other words Mercury regresses 31m Sept 1, and 24m Sept 2.  The numbers tell us Mercury retro is slowing down.  

We are at the creek (not exactly a river, but the flowing body of water I will visit when I finish this post to see how it is running after last night's big rains) looking at the oncoming water to see how fast it is moving before and after it passes a patch of rocks and debris.  Mercury will change direction as a leaf trapped in a whirlpool exits and continues toward the distant sea.  Or we can compare the decrease in Mercury's motion  to the slower running creek after the rain has washed to lower ground. Any allegory that comes to mind is a good place to start.  We are just looking for ways to feel welcome and relaxed purusing those  long columns of numbers in the ephemeris.

We won't consider here why the actual planet Mercury is changing direction; that's an exercise we can save for a future session of contemplation.

We looked at Mercury slowing down, now let's hop over the Venus column to the Mars column and find where Mars will overtake slowing Mercury.

Midnight UT Sept 3 

Mercury 28Leo51......Mars 28Leo29

Midnight UT Sept 4

Mercury 28Leo35......Mars 29Leo07

From the above figures we can deduce that Mars goes from 22m behind Mercury Sept 3 at 00hr to 32m ahead of Mercury  at 00hr Sept 4.  So we know Mars passes Mercury on the ecliptic highway sometime about halfway between those two times.

Since we are only astrologers and not math whiz computer programmers, we will have to guesstimate and get charts from Astrodienst check our guesses.  

First we want to make the terminology of time more familiar by converting UT time to local time.  Since we are 5 time zones west of Greenwich we know it is 7pm Sept 2 in Raleigh when it is midnight Sept 3 in Greenwich England..  Next we convert 7pm standard time to 8pm daylight savings time.  Converted to local time, our guess is halfway between 8pm Sept 2 and 8pm Sept 3. 

So I have a chart for 8am Sept 3 Raleigh.  You can see Mars 6 minutes ahead of Mercury in the 12th house.  I got a few more charts up and zeroed in on 5:37am, the last chart for this post.  You can see Mars and Mercury a bit lower, under the eastern horizon reflecting the earlier Raleigh time.

The chart for Mars meeting Mercury is like the micrscope sample, taken from the creek right when and where a floating stick was passing the aforementioned leaf in the whirlpool.   In the chart we see not just where the planets are along the ecliptic at midnight 00degrees longitude.  We get to see how the planets along the ecliptic appear from a specific spot on Earth at the moment in the 24hour period that Mars passes Mercury. 

And then....if we turn from the microscopic view of the chart back to the running creek view of the ephemeris, we can see that the leaf/Mercury will catch up.to the stick/Mars Sept 17.  

If you have followed this post and made sense of the relationship between the numbers in the ephemeris columns and the ones in the charts, congratulations !  You have accepted one of the challenges associated with Mars meeting Mercury!

Thanks for trudging through this post.  I am on my way to the creek. 

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