♌ Leaping Leo! ♌

Sorry for the messy graphics- think of all that text in the way as trees obstructing your view.  They must be good for something…..

The above is a screenshot from stellarium showing the sky from Raleigh at 1:20pm July 22, 2014. 

The vertical line through the middle is called the meridian, or midheaven.  It always bisects the blue curve which represents Earth’s equator projected out to heaven, or the celestial equator.  The red curve, which represents the ecliptic, is another story.  It represents the path the Sun makes in the course of a year, so to speak.  In other words things are not as they seem, and we are all DISLEXIC!

Not to worry though.  The zodiac is here to help us understand what is really happening.  And so is Stellarium.  They’ve got this nifty little button you can click to dim the Sun’s light, making the stars that are normally ‘washed out’ during the day, visible.  That bright ball on the meridian is the Sun.  You can’t see Jupiter right next to it, but you can see the last few letters ‘..piter.’  You might have to squint or use your reading glasses.

Back to the red line, or ecliptic; notice how it is off center, skewed toward the west.  That has something to do with the Earth revolving on a tilted axis, the trickiest thing you can meditate on in astrology, but the most important.  I believe it is the real reason we have the zodiac; but I’m just a housecleaner, so I could be wrong. 

Now check out this screenshot for 1:20 am July 22, again from Raleigh.

 

Here the red line for the ecliptic is lopsided to the east!  You probably can’t see the little light for Uranus, but maybe you can see the label in the eastern sky, where the ecliptic is crossed above the celestial equator.  Uranus is currently located in the 2^nd sidereal hour which begins at 15°Aries.  Aries begins where the red line crosses above the blue line.

If you feel lost, please do not give up.  This is heaven.  Just drop in now and then, take a look around, and pretty soon you’ll start recognizing planets and stars like familiar friends.

The down and up roller coaster ride on a tilted planet

Remember we said Capricorn on the midheaven means we’re at the top of our daily revolution and Cancer the Crab means we’re at the bottom.  When we ‘see’ Aquarius on the midheaven at 1:20am it means we are going down.  When Leo, the sign right after Cancer, comes across the midheaven, it means we are taking a graceful leap onto the table from the floor, like a cat.  Today, in Raleigh, Leo crosses the MC (midheaven) at 1:20pm daylight savings time.  Whenever anyone on earth sees the sun in the middle of the sky during the month of Leo, they know their little patch of earth is leaping up.  Meow!  Purrrrr….anything good on that table?

Saturn About Face in Scorpio

  Right now Saturn is swimming in the richest area of a giant lake of molasses.

This is a list of Saturn’s location by degree and minute as it comes to a virtual standstill July 17-25.  Scroll down to Monday, July 21 and you can see where it turns around and returns to forward motion.  The ℞ in the figure for July 1 indicates that Saturn is in the midst of its retrograde period;  and the ♏shows that it is in Scorpio.

     ♄ 

 July 1    16° ℞58'

        2    16° ♏56'             

        3    16° 54 '

        4    16°  52' 

        5    16°  51'

          6    16°  49'

          7    16°  48'

          8    16°  47'

          9    16°  45'

         10   16°  44'

         11   16°  43'

         12   16°  42'

         13   16°  42' 

         14   16°  41'

         15   16°  40'

         16   16°  40'

         17   16°  39'

         18   16°  39'

         19   16°  39'

         20   16°  39'

         21   16°D39'

         22   16°  39'

         23   16°  39'

         24   16°  39'

         25   16°  39'

         26   16°  40'

         27   16°  40'

         28   16°  41'

         29   16°  42'

         30   16°  43'

         31   16°  44'

If we could get more accurate figures we would probably ‘see’ it moving a few seconds per day.

This means the slow planet of time is going even slower in the Taurus duad (15°♏00' to 17°♏30') of Scorpio where life’s mysteries are seen from the meditative perspective of Ferdinand the Bull.  Saturn will gradually pick up speed and enter the Gemini duad of Scorpio (17°♏30'-20°♏00') Aug 22. 

Here is a link to some stuff about Saturn in Scorpio.

 

I copied the figures from the free ephemeris on Astrodienst.

The Ins and Outs of Gemini

(It looks like I wrote this post sometime between May 26-29 when Mercury ☿was at the end of Gemini ♊. Can’t remember why I did not post it.  Anyway☿ backed through that same section June 18-21.  Soon, July 10-13, it will go forward through the end of Gemini one last time and say bye-bye to the Twins until next May.)

I made my 2^nd list of Roman rulers this week.  The first was scribbled between columns of a newspaper over a month ago.  There may have been others, but they have been forgotten.  Mercury is in the last little section of Gemini and I can feel the determination to record this information and put it where I can get to it without lengthy searching.  If you look at the zodiac wheel and count the signs around from Gemini at the beginning you will see that Taurus is the last one.  You could also just go backwards one step and see Taurus right next door, the boring sign before the Twins bubbling with news and views.  (I'm allowed to call Taurus boring because I am a Taurus and so proud of my ability to complete the most boring of tasks) You can enter any sign this way and observe the twelve subdivisions that together make up the sign. Gemini begins with a thirst for information (the first subsection of a sign is the purest expression of that sign) and moves from an emotional response in Cancer, through declaration in Leo, fact checking in Virgo, reflection in Libra, introspection on motivation in Scorpio, synthesis in Sagittarius….all the way to making-it-so in Taurus.  In the Taurus part of Gemini what is ‘made so’ is nothing more than information- maybe a map, a photo, a drawing or a list.  What has been perceived in Gemini is being committed to memory, or engraved where it can be retrieved.  Since today Mercury, the planet which actively rules in Gemini, is in the Taurus section of that sign I have an excuse to talk about this process of suspending Gemini bubbles for posterity or future reference.*

I’ve started out on the inside of the forest though, before giving you a good shot of what it looks like from the distance of the rolling plains.  In other words I broke The Twins into twelve little pieces before outlining their unique position in the zodiac.  What differentiates the 30 degrees of Gemini from the rest of the zodiac is the fact that they all look the same- that’s why they’re called twins!  Actually the degrees of Cancer are similarly indistinguishable from each other, but Gemini gets called the Twins because it is the first section in the zodiac where we see this sameness.

A lot of people think Gemini is called Twins because people looked up at the constellation containing Pollux and Castor 20 centuries ago and saw a pair of cute munchkins.  I don’t buy that and neither should you.  It makes a good story like flying reindeer but that’s only useful for getting restless kids to sleep on long winter nights.  The more convincing explanation requires a bit more concentration; the secret is in carefully watching what happens on the mid heaven from one moment to the next throughout a 24 hour cycle.  That is hard to do under any circumstances, so the next best thing is to scroll through a series of charts that record the sky’s changes in secret code.  Just joking, it is only secret because hardly anybody cares to figure it out!

So put on your Taurus work clothes and let’s get down and dirty with some charts.  In a minute here I’m going to send you over to a link where I’ve posted a series of 36 charts for March 30.  The first chart is for 12:43pm March 30 and the rest follow in approximately 20 minute intervals through 12:41am March 31.  You’ll see a line sticking up at the top of the first chart with 0°♈ 07' written over it.  Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means- for now all you need to do is watch how that line gradually moves to the center of the circle.

In the second chart you will see 6°♈ 08' over the line for the mid heaven.  The red curved bar that the line is going through represents the Aries♈ section of the zodiac.  As that red bar progresses clockwise, the MC (Latin abbreviation for mid heaven) will move a tad in the opposite direction.  By the sixth chart it is 2:34pm and Taurus♉ is crossing the MC as shown by the green bar.  The eastern part of the sky has shrunk from 105° 56' to 99°00'- that is a difference of nearly 7° from Aries to Taurus.  The twelfth chart for 4:34pm  shows  0°♊on the MC and the eastern arc of the sky 93°22'.  The line showing the mid heaven is just about straight up.  Before scrolling down to see what happens while the yellow Gemini bar moves across the top of the circle note that the eastern sky has shrunk 5°38' further.  (99°00'- 93°22'=5°38')  

Jumping to the chart where the 1^st degree of Cancer (0°♋06') is on the MC we have an eastern arc of just under 90° - giving a difference in arc from the beginning to end of Gemini of 3°23'.  In every 20 minute interval for Aries on the mid heaven the eastern arc lost at least 1°22' while in the 20 minute intervals of Gemini on the mid heaven the arc shrunk an average of only 0°34'. 

                                                      Total decrease in eastern arc
                                                              Aries           7°00'

                                                              Taurus         5°38' 

                                                              Gemini         3°23'

                                                              Cancer         3°23'

                                                              Leo             5°40'

                                                              Virgo           6°57'

                                                              Libra            4°47'

                                                       Total increase in eastern arc   
                                                              Scorpio        3°27'

                                                              Sagittarius    17°22'

                                                              Capricorn     7°18'

                                                              Aquarius       3°23'

                                                        Total decrease in eastern arc    
                                                              Pisces           4°48'  

♈-♍on MC  Click on the link for the series of charts showing Aries through Virgo crossing the mid heaven.

 

Instead of doing charts for the last six signs of the zodiac I am preparing a video slide show of a 24 hour cycle for the day of the Greensboro sit ins.  That project will take some time, especially if I keep distracting myself with these posts!

What really blows me away, that I can't wait to demonstrate in the upcoming slideshow, is the unmistakable change that takes place while Sagittarius is crossing the mid heaven.  Sagittarius opposes Gemini on the zodiac wheel and the Archer is indeed the opposite of The Twins.

Now I’m wondering where I put that list of Roman Rulers….

*post was written around May 27