Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Hercules Awake

7:16am
I got up a few minutes after 5:47 this morn. The chart for that moment showed the old crescent moon a couple degrees above the horizon, so I knew it would be visible soon. It was below freezing and I really didn’t want to go out, though I knew the sky was clear. Then I remembered that the moon in Capricorn rises a good 20 degrees south of east and I could probably see it from my south facing (not exactly south, about 30 east of south) front door window. There are 3 small panes of glass right around eye level for a 5ft8in adult. Well, I looked and looked. It seemed time for the old queen to enter stage left. Finally I went outside, crossed the street and there it was, on the other side of the giant canvass of dark foliage spreading like a thick fan above the trunk of a live oak, one of the few not yet turned into wood chips in the park my house faces.


7:20 break to check for sunrise.
Not showing yet, bout 15 more minutes. This morning I woke up thinking, among vague memories of a dream and other forgotten stuff, about a note I came across recently: Hercules wakes up in January. I’m guessing I came across it in studies of ancient philosophy. I wondered how much later in the year Hercules reappears in the morning sky now-a-days. Or if Hercules 'wakes up' a bit earlier.  Guessing the fourteenth hour would be near the MC I picked up my little phone and did a chart. You can see the MC for 5:47 this morn in Raleigh was at the end of Libra. Libra goes from about 12hours to 14 hours. Every sign extends about 2 hours along the equator, more or less. It’s that more or less that makes each sign special, unique, for reals as in real estate that surveyors measure and map, but this is heavenly real estate, which still belongs to all of us, since aren’t we all children of God and isn’t that where God lives? I might be using slippery logic there. 

 

7:37 the Sun is up
It is a degree above the naked trees. I was waiting to confirm, to get a good sense of the actual body, as opposed to the little white circle on Stellarium, or the symbol in the chart, that the Sun would come up a few degrees north compared to the old Capricorn Moon. A handwidth to the left (since I live in the northern hemisphere* and face south to view the planetary highway, aka ecliptic) of this morn’s Moonrise. I treasure, literally, the way Silas Marner counted the rolling coins when he was living in exile from the Christians that banished him from their community – I treasure the ability to guesstimate where a planet will appear on the eastern horizon. It doesn’t seem so important on a map, every thing is on the same page; all we have to do is scan the symbols to find what interests us, which is especially easy when we’re familiar with what those symbols (or the planets they represent) do. An electronic engineer, familiar with the language, can tell where the voltage increases or decreases in the map of a circuit; an accountant can review financial records and tell where a company is losing or gaining capital; an astrologer, knowing how fast each planet moves and the directions of various intersecting cycles can quickly locate her target on a chart.

But the actual sky is sooo much bigger! It is the difference between reading the little guidebook for the Appalachian Trail that describes where the next spring is; a hundred paces beyond the hairpin turn in the trail, take a right at the opening in the rail fence. Follow the blue blazes 500 yards. The spring is on the left. When the Nalgene bottles are all empty the faith in those directions is sorely tested. But testing those directions is what we do. And when we get confused and take a left where it said take a right, or somehow miss some little detail, and have to go back and check, and do it all over, and wonder, did the people writing this guide know what they were doing? And look! There it is! Cool water hopping over little rocks and pebbles! Something we would surely have passed over on the trail had we not put faith in that guidebook, had we not put it to the test.

It is sweet indeed, as water from a cool spring, when we are hot and thirsty, carrying food on our back and a bag to keep us warm when we lay down under the stars at night. It is sweet to have a guide to where we are in heaven as well as where we are on earth.

Thirty years ago I had know idea where or when to look for the Moon on any given night. Now I do. I don’t have to use timeanddate.com or even my romantic old timey charts, they only confirm my estimate and provide easy access to extremely accurate pinpointing. The real logistics are now well germinated in my mind. My mental map of heaven is almost as comprehensive as the mental map of my body.

I know if the Sun is entering Aquarius, the old sliver of a crescent Moon will rise in Capricorn. The nature of Capricorn is that it always comes up right before Aquarius, that it always appears most southerly on the eastern horizon, and always makes the lowest ark across the sky. The secret, in the days of Pythagoras and Plato, was that we saw it low in Capricorn because we were in the highest part of our daily revolution on tilted Earth, or Gaia. Gamma eta. The word at the root of Genesis and generate. We see any planet low on the horizon in the sign of the goat, because we are as high as we can get with respect to the celestial equator.

We won’t see the sliver moon rising this low until next year. We can see the not quite so old, or skinny Capricorn Moon rise Feb 18, but we’ll have to get up 2 hours earlier (3:57am) to catch it. The charts and east coast astrologers will say it’s in Sagittarius. But here is where numbers help. In Raleigh the Moon will be at 29 Sagittarius when it rises, which is closer to the low tropic than 3 Capricorn where it rose this morn.


For Van in Memphis TN that translates to 3:35am. And check out who it will be near! Mars, Jupiter, Pluto and Saturn. A nice parade of planets traveling through the lower tropic of the ecliptic! We all get to see that, not at once, we have to wait our turn on the giant carnival ride.



Well, I have a new job, not sure when I start. Canvasser for Power Up NC. Who knows how this will affect my vice of blogging.

I guess that’s why I started this post. Thinking about Hercules coming out of hibernation, seeing it rise in the early morning sky after months of being obscured by the Sun, and how the ancients called it ‘waking up.’ I didn’t actually look for Hercules, I saw the Big Dipper over Polaris, so I knew it was in the north east. I also knew since the 14th hour was crossing the meridian, the !6th-18th hours were rising in the east.



Hercules is a northern constellation stretching from the !6th to the 18th hour. But like I said I didn’t look for Hercules; instead I ran over to the parking lot looking for the show stealing Moon hidden behind that massive old live oak. I’ll spot Hercules tomorrow morn. I can probably see it without even leaving my front yard. I’ve been missing the night sky, falling asleep early, or reading under blankets instead of stepping outside. I’m getting a blog post and a few nighttime glimpses in before my work week gets busier.

10:04am Wed Jan 22, 2020

*I’m thinking about folks in southern hemisphere. After all it is part of the same planet. I usually imagine someone viewing the sky from Valdivia Chile, since that’s about the same longitude as Brooklyn NY. They would see the skinny old Moon rising way north of east (Cancer the Crab – from the southern hemisphere the same stretch of the ecliptic that we see low appears high in the sky!)  Also they are facing north instead of south to see the ecliptic, so they see the Moon rising on their right. That, to me, is like the midnight Sun in Alaska - hard to believe without actually seeing.  This link shows how I alter astrodienst charts to look more like the actual sky in the southern hemisphere
10:17am

12:54pm at public library
Inserted the images, made a few changes and now going to post.  Gotta go clean a big old house for some big hearted customers.