Category Archives: Astronomy

A supersized lunar eclipse

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I’ll be posting tomorrow about the astrological effects of the upcoming Gemini eclipse, but meanwhile please enjoy this story from NASA about the supersized “Moon Illusion.”  (Thanks to Astrococktail for the link.)

During the eclipse, most of the light from the Moon will pass through atmospheric effects that will create a red effect around the Moon as it hangs low in the sky.  This will create a magical atmosphere and fits in nicely with the fact that Uranus changes direction that day, turning direct and creating surprising events to promote change and evolution.

 

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Regulus moves into Virgo and the British law of succession changes

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regulus in virgoWhat we call the “fixed stars” (as opposed to planets, known in antiquity as the “wanderers” because they moved across the sky from the vantage point of ancient humans) are actually not so fixed.  Although they appear in the same position in the sky, their apparent motion does shift by about 50 seconds of arc per year.

Regulus, the star associated with royalty, is also called “The heart of the Lion” because of its placement in the center of the Leo star system.  But Regulus is moving into Virgo for the first time since around 200 bce, creating a major shift of star energy.

The exact time of this shift is in dispute.  Solar Fire, an astrology software program used by many professional astrologers (including me) lists the entry of Regulus into Virgo in early 2011 – others say that this shift will occur in 2012, conveniently linking the transition of Regulus to the 2012 hysteria.  In any case, a shift of this magnitude typically doesn’t happen overnight but occurs slowly over time.

Leo is a “masculine” sign – yang and full of energy and enthusiasm, it tends to be concerned with issues of power and dominance and much more forceful than Virgo.  Virgo is much more reticent and desirous of order and safety, so the movement of Regulus into Virgo could change the way in which the Earth has been ruled for the past 2000 years.  Virgo is said to be a “feminine” sign, yin and receptive, so it was interesting to see that in Britain the law of succession may be changed so that women who are the first born can inherit the crown, even if there are male heirs.

All of this occurs under the larger umbrella of the shift into the Aquarian Age, but it does add an interesting layer of changing focus to be studied.

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Jupiter was almost a star

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I’m mostly posting on this because it’s such a fantastic photo from the Cassini probe (Source: Daily Galaxy).  The article is pretty incredible too:

Jupiter, the most massive planet in our solar system — with dozens of moons and an enormous magnetic field — resembles a star in composition, but it did not grow big enough to ignite. The planet’s swirling cloud stripes are broken by storms, the most massive being the Great Red Spot, which has raged for hundreds of years.

New thermal images from powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which has persisted for as long as 200 to 350 years, based on early telescopic observations, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system.

The observations reveal that the reddest color of the Great Red Spot corresponds to a warm core within the otherwise cold storm system, and images show dark lanes at the edge of the storm where gases are descending into the deeper regions of the planet. These types of data, detailed in a paper appearing in the journal Icarus, give scientists a sense of the circulation patterns within the solar system’s best-known storm system.

“This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system,” said Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who was one of the authors of the paper. “We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated.”

It’s a stretch  to tie this in to astrology (sometimes a cigar is, after all, just a cigar) but I’m going to attempt to do just that.  I have always felt that the astrological Jupiter is a bit of a comic book planet, treated rather like Santa Claus or a big fat happy bringer of all good things.  In reality, as you know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, Jupiter has a deep complexity that belies its reputation as a good guy.

I wrote about the darker side of Jupiter just last week when he turned retrograde so I really like the image described here of a deep storm that has been going on for perhaps hundreds of years.  But at the same time Jupiter has sufficient mass and power that it was almost a star – just as the astrological Jupiter is in some ways like a second Sun.  We must honor the energy of the Sun in our charts to feel nourished and alive; we must honor the energy of Jupiter to feel whole and with a sense that our lives on Earth have meaning.

And anyway, what a cool photograph!

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Decoding the Galactic Center

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The Galactic Center, at 26 degrees Sagittarius, was a big topic a few years ago when Pluto transited  through that point for the first time in 244 years, but it’s not a subject that receives a great deal of astrological discussion otherwise.

Astrologically, the Galactic Center is the heart of the Universe – the soul of wisdom for our solar system and our species of humanity.

Now there is a beautiful photo that maps the Galactic Center, showing where the black hole and surrounding galaxies reside.

If like me this is still ultra-confusing, try this cute map of the Milky Way Transit Authority which imagines the Galactic Center as Grand Central Station.

Milky Way

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Pluto has a new moon!

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Uranus rules surprising events, so it’s an interesting synchronicity that a new Moon around Pluto is discovered just as the square between Uranus and Pluto reaches its closest point until next year.  Temporarily named P-4, the new moon may ultimately be called Cerberus after the dog that guards the gates of Hades.

The New Horizons mission is expected to reach Pluto in 2015, just as the square of Uranus to Pluto reaches its completion.

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The Universe defies expectations

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Hubble telescope

I always feel a certain amount of glee when conventional science is turned on its head.  After all, conventional science pooh-poohs not only astrology, but also psychology and any other field of study which cannot be rigorously tested and duplicated without fail.

So naturally I love this:

Space is festooned with vast “hyperclusters” of galaxies, a new cosmic map suggests. It could mean that gravity or dark energy – or perhaps something completely unknown – is behaving very strangely indeed.

We know that the universe was smooth just after its birth. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the light emitted 370,000 years after the big bang, reveal only very slight variations in density from place to place. Gravity then took hold and amplified these variations into today’s galaxies and galaxy clusters, which in turn are arranged into big strings and knots called superclusters, with relatively empty voids in between.

On even larger scales, though, cosmological models say that the expansion of the universe should trump the clumping effect of gravity. That means there should be very little structure on scales larger than a few hundred million light years across.

But the universe, it seems, did not get the memo. Shaun Thomas of University College London (UCL), and colleagues have found aggregations of galaxies stretching for more than 3 billion light years. The hyperclusters are not very sharply defined, with only a couple of per cent variation in density from place to place, but even that density contrast is twice what theory predicts.

“This is a challenging result for the standard cosmological models,” says Francesco Sylos Labini of the University of Rome, Italy, who was not involved in the work. …

The result hints at some profound new physical phenomenon, perhaps involving dark energy – the mysterious entity that is accelerating the expansion of space. Dark energy is usually assumed to be uniform across the cosmos. If instead it can pool in some areas, then its repulsive force could push away nearby matter, creating these giant patterns.

Alternatively, we may need to extend our understanding of gravity beyond Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “It could be that we need an even more general theory to explain how gravity works on very large scales,” says Thomas.

read more here…

I love that the Universe is bigger and more complex than we can possibly imagine, and that in order to truly understand our place in it we must let go of our old, limited ideas and embrace the magic and mystery that is found everywhere around us!

 

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Pagan aspects of the Solstice

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Astrologer Gary Caton has a nice article today about the pagan symbolism in the Wheel of the Year and also connects the Solstices and Equinoxes to the Tarot:

there are 4 cards in the Tarot which tell the story of these 4 cardinal points that begin the 4 seasons. The first of these cards is The Sun. This is the card of the Winter Solstice and it speaks of the re-birth of the Sun at mid-winter as the days begin to grow longer again. It is followed by The Emperor (Spring Equinox), which speaks of the triumph of Light over Darkness as the days become longer than the nights. The Hanged Man (Summer Solstice) follows, and speaks of the surrender of Light to the growing Darkness as the days begin to shorten in length. Finally we have The Devil, who is sort of an anti-Emperor and speaks of the triumph of Darkness over Light as the nights become longer than the days. …

The Horned God, who is the consort of the Goddess, takes two forms which alternate much like the yin/yang of the Taoists -the Holly King and the Oak King. This can be seen to reflect the declination cycle of the Sun through the seasons as outlined above. At Winter solstice two kings are born -the Light King and the Dark King. The Light King rules the first half of the year. At midsummer he is sacrificed (in effigy) and the Dark King rules the 2nd half of the year. The Dark King can be thought of as Bacchus or Dionysus instead of the “Devil.” He represents chaos and catharsis whereas the Light King represents order and stability.

read more here…

For a vivid description of how the pagan imagery from the Cross of Matter that is the Equinoxes and Solstices turned into Christianity, you might enjoy this clip from the first Zeitgeist Movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNf-P_5u_Hw

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Much ado about Comet Elenin

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Comet EleninOver the past few months I have read lots of exciting news about Comet Elenin – that it could be the Blue Star Kachina of the Hopi Prophecy, heralding the end times, or that it is actually Planet X, the Nibiru of Zechariah Sitchin fame that comes close to Earth every 3600 years.  Or that the Comet Elenin was a Brown Dwarf star headed for a collision of earth in September of 2011, ready to extinguish life on earth as we know it.

Despite the frenzy of fearmongering and misinformation, there are some interesting coincidences that have followed Comet Elenin which was discovered in December of 2010.  One scientist has found correlations between alignments of Elenin with the Sun and Earth going back as far as 2006 that correspond to increased seismic activity.


The timing of the Elenin/Sun/Earth alignment of March 15th just after the spectacular horrific earthquake and tsunami in Japan on March 11th has given rise to speculation that the perihelion of Comet Elenin in September 2011 could give rise to more dramatic seismic activity.  The earthquake in Japan was preceded by an X-class solar flare on March 9th and a coronal mass ejection (CME) that hit the Earth’s atmosphere on March 10th after an M-class flare on March 7th.  As astrologers know, alignments are generally stronger when they are in their applying phase than their separating phase.

Most scientists, of course, don’t believe that Comet Elenin has a strong enough magnetic field to have any effect on Earth.

“Comet Elenin will not only be far away, it is also on the small side for comets. And comets are not the most densely-packed objects out there. They usually have the density of something akin to loosely packed icy dirt,” said Yeomans. “So you’ve got a modest-sized icy dirtball that is getting no closer than 35 million kilometers. It will have an immeasurably miniscule influence on our planet. By comparison, my subcompact automobile exerts a greater influence on the ocean’s tides than comet Elenin ever will.” (Don Yeomans, NASA researcher)

I’m not saying I believe that the poles will shift and the Earth will end as it passes through the comet’s tail.  But I’m not sure I would place all of my faith in scientists – after all, scientists have a bad habit of lacking imagination and an appreciation for the magic of the Universe.

 

 

 

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Summer eclipse season is coming

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Solar eclipse 2011, lunar eclipse 2011

Image from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, 2003. Solar and lunar eclipses occur when the Moon is either full (opposite the Sun) or “new” (conjunct the Sun), and one of the lunar nodes is located within 15 degrees of a conjunction to the Moon.  As you’ve probably heard me say before, the astrological impact of an eclipse comes from the presence of the lunar nodes.

The nodes of the Moon are points in the sky where the Moon crosses the path of the Sun as it is observed from Earth.  They are not actual astronomical bodies, but instead serve as signposts to show us where we have come from and what we need to leave behind (South, or descending Node) and the direction in which our soul is taking us (North, or ascending Node).  The Nodes represent the crossroads between the Soul (Moon) and the Spirit (Sun) with the physical incarnation (Earth).  Powerful stuff!

Typically there are two pairs of eclipses in a year, with two eclipses in each pair.  This summer brings three separate eclipses:

  • Solar eclipse June 1st at 11 Gemini
  • Lunar eclipse June 15th at 24 Sagittarius
  • Solar eclipse July 1st at 9 Cancer

The last time there were three eclipses in the summer was 2009 and you can read more about that here.

Although eclipses have been feared for thousands of years, unless you follow Vedic principles there is no need to fear an eclipse period.  Eclipses tend to reveal and expose aspects of our lives which are hidden and which need to be brought into the conscious realm in order for us to develop and progress.  This isn’t always fun, but the end result is worth any momentary discomfort we may experience.

The solar eclipse on June 1st is a partial eclipse (with the nodes 12 degrees from the Moon), and not very powerful.  In addition, the Moon makes no direct aspect to any other planet other than a nice trine to Saturn.

The lunar eclipse on June 15th is another story.  This is a total eclipse, and the T-square with Saturn, Uranus and Pluto is lining up and will form a Grand Cross with the Summer Solstice Sun at 0 degrees Cancer.  (Geeky astrological detail: Uranus will be at 4 Aries, Pluto at 6 Cap, Saturn at 10 Libra.) The planetary energy is intensifying at this time and we may encounter some energy shifts that will affect us personally as well.

The chart for the Solstices and Equinoxes often reflects weather patterns for that season, and no wonder we’ve been having such severe weather over the past year: Each Solstice and Equinox, at 0 degrees of a cardinal sign, has been in a stressful alignment with Saturn, Uranus or Pluto.  The trend will continue over the summer and into the fall of 2011.

The final eclipse of the season will occur July 1st at the New Moon.  With the Sun and Moon at 9 degrees Cancer, this eclipse is firmly locked into the Cardinal Grand Cross.  If you have planets in your own chart between 3 and 12 degrees of one of the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn) this eclipse could have a dramatic effect on your emotions, your psyche, your relationships with others (which is usually the domain through which our emotions are expressed).

Planetary cycles only wreak havoc with our lives where change is needed.  In an ideal world, learning about astrology will help us to embrace change with trust and an open heart, providing us with a greater understanding that the patterns of the Universe unfold with meaning and compassion.

For daily planetary news, visit my Facebook and Twitter pages.

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