Astrology Quarterly - Astronomy - Heavens Above

A S Morton

Heavens Above - August 2007

Here on our ‘magic roundabout’, planet Earth, we are now in the warm-hearted centre of a northern hemisphere summer, the ‘golden’ month of August that is. We’ve been increasingly leaning towards the Sun from the time of the Spring Equinox back on the 21st March and ever since then, as the Sun climbed higher into our northern skies, more of the Sun’s rays have been filtering through our atmosphere and heating up the northern land masses and oceans. Even though the Sun reached its northern peak on the 21st June, paused for a while, and has since then been slowly descending, the time lag in establishing an equilibrium between the air, the land and the sea is such that it is only towards the end of July and into August that we experience the full-bodied heat of summer, the kind of heat that makes the evenings warm as well as the days. It’s the time of the year when the four elements of nature: fire, earth, air and water are in fine balance, just before the tipping point of autumn.

It’s the month of the Sun, of the lion, of ‘tropical’ Leo, although in our ‘heavens above’ the Sun doesn’t make it across the border from the constellation of Cancer and into the constellation of Leo until the 11th of the month, such are the continuing effects of precession and the modern re-arrangement of the constellation boundaries.

The warmer summer evenings are a good time to go outside and survey the night skies and even though the nights are still quite shortish and not so dark as the winter months there’s still plenty to admire. High above stands the ‘summer triangle’ of bright stars: Altair in the constellation Aquila (the ‘eagle’), Deneb in Cygnus (the ‘swan’) and Vega in Lyra (the ‘lyre’, ‘harp’). August is also one of the best months for ‘celestial fireworks’, meteor showers that is, when tiny particles from comets burn up in our upper atmosphere with the familiar flash of a skyrocket tail across the night skies. The best of them all is the Perseids, emanating from the direction of the constellation Perseus, which peak around the night of 12th/13th with a frequency of anything up to 1 glorious ‘shooting star’ per minute visible on a clear night.

Perseus rises in the northeast shortly after dusk and is located just above the constellations of Taurus and Aries and to the right of Auriga (the ‘charioteer’). You can use the red planet Mars as a marker (see the section on Mars further on) as he is currently located just below the area where most of the action will be taking place. Helpfully the Moon is new that particular night, setting in the west along with the Sun, so the skies will be as dark as they can be at this time of year and should make for unobstructed viewing.

The new Moon on the night of the 12th/13th is quite a close one with the Sun and Moon separated by only about three diameters (centre to centre) but towards the end of the month on the 28th there is a total eclipse of the full Moon, when the Moon’s entire body moves into the dark shadow of the Earth, the umbra, which will be visible from countries around the rim of the Pacific Ocean but unfortunately not from Europe on this occasion.

Planet-wise we have the familiar story of late, three of them are huddling around the Sun in a close little grouping, making it almost impossible to see them clearly, whilst the two fiery ones seem to be full of energy and are out and about enjoying themselves in the heat of the night.

MERCURY, having been a somewhat reluctant morning star in the second half of last month, arrives at superior conjunction on the 15th of this month (far side of the Sun as viewed from Earth and moving direct), and then travels on into the evening sky but is keeping too low down to be observable. In fact, that’s pretty well it from Mercury for a while now, he’s turned himself into a seasonal hermit, lying low for the summer months. He obviously needs a break, perhaps the mind is in need of a rest. So why not put down those books and put your feet up for a while, school’s out for summer.

On the other hand VENUS is all in a daze and spends the whole month going backwards (retrograde), retracing her steps over very recently traversed territory. Oh gosh, here comes Saturn again! What a surprise encounter (as if she didn’t know), and so soon after their previous meeting! They had only recently met at the beginning of last month as Venus eventually caught up with Saturn after all these many months and then seemingly rather casually brushed past him without so much as a flicker in Venus’s inimitable, apparently disinterested, style. Yet here they are again on the 13th of this month on the very day of the new, and therefore unseen, Moon (who ghost-like slides past and very close to Saturn), but this time they’re going in opposite directions and so far apart, at over 8° separation, that you could hardly call it the coming together that the word ‘conjunction’ implies, more like people passing on opposite sides of the street. Saturn is within the constellation of Leo and keeping pretty close to the ‘yellowbrick road’ of the ecliptic while Venus has wandered off south into the rather strange ‘modern’ constellation of Sextans. There are 88 ‘modern’ constellations and Sextans is one of those that were introduced by the Polish astronomer Hevelius around 1680 to commemorate the instrument he used for much of his naked-eye star observations and measurements.

Anyway, what is Venus doing down there? Well, whatever is going on between her and Saturn they are now so close to the Sun that observing them is no longer possible.

Venus arrives at inferior conjunction (between the Earth and Sun) only a few days later on the 18th, the very same day that slinky Mercury sidles up to Saturn (to subtly impart some valuable information or, more likely, a snippet or two of hot gossip). Is Saturn listening, is he really bothered? Confusingly, this ‘inferior conjunction’ of Venus is yet another of those oddities of celestial longitude, the measure that astrologers use to determine the relative position of a planetary body along the great circle of the ecliptic. She’s actually nowhere near the Sun at this point, never mind conjunction, and at nearly 8° away has now drifted into the ancient constellation of Hydra, the ‘water serpent’. The sprawling Hydra covers the very largest area in the heavens of all the constellations, even more than Virgo, and is one of the 48 constellations listed by Ptolemy. It is situated south of the ecliptic below the zodiacal constellations of Leo and Cancer.

Venus even moves a little further than 8° angular distance from the ecliptic in the following days and it might even be possible to still see Venus at this time except that to look anywhere near the Sun without the proper eye protection would be highly dangerous and therefore inadvisable.

Mercury and Saturn are quite closely conjoined on the 18th and even though neither are in conjunction with the Sun at this time and are technically, in celestial longitude, further away from the Sun than Venus, they are both closer to the ecliptic than she is and therefore so much closer to the Sun than Venus herself that they are quite definitely ‘combust’, obliterated by the light of the Sun, and not visible at all for the latter part of the month.

Whatever the reason for Venus being in the constellation of Hydra, this moment marks a significant point in her cycle. Venus comes to inferior conjunction 5 times in every 8 years. So regular is this eight-year cycle of hers, and so bright is she in our ‘heavens above’, being the very brightest of all the celestial objects (other than the Sun and Moon), even brighter than the massive Jupiter, that ancient civilisations such as the Mayans from South America used her cycle to calculate their calendars. Her sighting at various points in this cycle were even used by many to determine auspicious times to go to war or to make sacrifices, animal or even human in some cases, something we might more readily associate with the planet Mars. So Venus is not all ‘sweetness and light’; romance, love, beauty, music and poetry, as we might like to consider her, she certainly has another altogether more ruthless side to her. However, when she comes to inferior conjunction she always presents the same side of herself to us here on planet Earth, a bit like the Moon does even though their cycles are entirely different, so she cleverly doesn’t show us her ‘other side’ close up, she somehow manages to ‘turn the other cheek’ as it were.

All planets have elliptical orbits. Venus’ orbit around the Sun, even though elliptical, is one of the closest to being a circle of all the planets, even more circular than Earth’s, and is deemed to be one of the most regular of the Sun’s satellites. The plane of the ecliptic, as described by the apparent path of the Sun around the Earth, is very much the plane of the solar system and contains fairly closely the orbits of all of the ‘planets’ (not including Pluto the ‘dwarf planet’). The traditional constellations situated along the ecliptic are the familiar zodiac constellations and the ‘band of the zodiac’ is determined as being a band of 8? either side of the ecliptic. Why is that so? Not to contain the constellations themselves, as one might think, because it does not contain all of the zodiacal constellations in their entirety, but actually to contain the variation in the orbits of the planets relative to the ecliptic as viewed from Earth. We might imagine that such as Mercury or Mars, planets visible from Earth with the naked eye, would be the rogue planets that wander about all over the place, or even that Uranus, not known to our ancient ancestors, would be quite wilfully out of step with the other planets in our system. And even though Mercury, quite obviously so, and Mars are certainly a bit erratic in their orbital paths, Uranus, and incidentally even more especially Neptune, are two bodies that orbit fairly close to the plane of the ecliptic. No, it is not to contain these planetary bodies that the band of the zodiac is 8? wide either side of the ecliptic, but in part to accommodate the orbital behaviour of our apparently well-behaved, ‘princess of the night’, ‘butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth’, goddess of beauty and love Aphrodite, a.k.a. Venus, herself. All very surprising, perhaps?

Anyway, Venus is off doing her own thing at this moment in time, as is her usual way, and presumably with little or no regard for what others might deem to be socially acceptable behaviour. Perhaps she feels the need to be alone for a while so she’s doing her planetary impersonation of a ‘Greta Garbo’, always the ‘drama queen’ it would seem. It would appear that Uranus is not the only planet that we might associate with wilfulness, as is generally believed to be the case. Tut, tut! Well, never mind, a little bit of what you fancy every now and then is good for the ‘soul’ (if not the body) and Venus is a past mistress at indulging in a lot of what she fancies, most of the time. And why not indeed?

Before month’s end Venus reappears in our pre-dawn skies as a brilliant ‘morning star’, bold and sparkling bright once more, and very quickly slips into her age-old ‘dizzy blonde’ routine. Now that’s what you might call a real ‘trouper’! Whatever the situation, however well or badly things are going for her, she just gets on about her business, in this instance the business of dazzling and beguiling whoever happens to be around to notice her. There’s nothing quite like a whole repertoire of thoroughly practised ‘attention seeking’ antics to stir the blood, and perhaps even some other bodily fluids as well. It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it!

Having been conjoined widely by Venus on the 13th and then more closely by Mercury on the 18th, SATURN is now press-ganged into his solar conjunction on the 21st as the Sun finally catches up with him, which is possibly the very last straw in his month’s sequence of draining events. It’s all got too much, too hot and too heavy even for his liking, and his last reserves of energy are finally zapped. Time for a fresh start perhaps, a new approach to those seemingly never-ending problems that forever weigh him down. Taking his lead from Venus once more he re-appears later next month in the pre-dawn skies as a rather shy ‘morning star’. Anyone would think he was following her around at the moment.

JUPITER is now firmly settled back into the saddle of the Scorpion and having slowed right down to find the perfect position becomes stationary almost directly above the bright red blinking Antares and then kick-starts his forward movement on the 7th. He may have been at opposition to the Sun back in June, and theoretically then at his brightest, but he is still a bold object in the early part of the night, appearing low down in the southern skies as darkness falls and then riding off into the night across the western horizon, before midnight by month’s end.

As Jupiter is setting in the west, so MARS is rising over in the east in the middle of the night. He’s now in the constellation of Taurus and his passage through those distinctive stars can be marked during the course of the month. He’s also getting bigger, bolder and brighter as the month unfolds and he gets closer to us. Actually, it’s us on our ‘magic roundabout’ that’s getting closer to him as we are catching him up on our inner orbital path. Rising just after midnight in the northeast at the beginning of the month and before midnight by month’s end, on the 7th he’s just below the Pleiades (the ‘Seven Sisters’), that twinkling little patch of fireflies buzzing around above the head of the Bull, but the waning crescent Moon comes along and occults (passes in front of and covers) much of that fuzzy grouping of stars on the same night. By the following night, the 8th, the Moon has moved to roughly the same altitude as Mars and the three make for a neat celestial triangle up in the heavens, with the Pleiades at the apex.

By the 20th of the month Mars arrives above that other grouping of celestial sisters in Taurus, the Hyades, both the Pleiades and the Hyades being related as daughters of the fabled universe-supporting Atlas, and in the following few nights comes closest to Aldebaran, the red supergiant star which is ‘the eye of the Bull’. The two have been ‘eyeing’ each other all month and now they face each other eyeball-to-eyeball, Mars far outshining his rival in both brightness and redness such that Aldebaran almost looks a washed-out pale orange by comparison. Mars would appear to have got the Bull well and truly ‘by the horns’ at this moment and with Jupiter sitting atop the traditional ‘rival of Mars’, the red supergiant star Antares in Scorpius, it would seem to be the month for the celestial ‘red brigade’ with Mars quite definitely being the winner of any comparative competition, such is his currently increasing strength and confidence.

This is certainly not the time to stand in the way of a rampant Mars. Nor even a Zeus clutching the reins of a deadly scorpion. It would seem that the power at this time is, perhaps appropriately, with the heavenly bodies of fire: the Sun, Mars and Jupiter.

© A.S.Morton – July 2007