Astrology Quarterly - Astronomy - Heavens Above

A S Morton

Heavens Above - October 2007

Our Sun is a shining star, not only to us but also out there in the heavens above. Classified as a seemingly innocuous main-sequence ‘yellow dwarf’ star, it is nearly halfway through its expected useful lifespan. In less than 5 billion years from now it will have expanded into a ‘red giant’ becoming 1000 times brighter and 100 times bigger, engulfing Mercury and probably Venus. Even if planet Earth is not consumed by this inferno our Moon, which is separating from us at the rate of 4cms every year, will have by then moved too far away to afford us any further protection. Earth’s surface temperature will reach 3000°C, oceans will boil dry, rocks will melt. Eventually over time the Sun will shrink into a tiny ‘white dwarf’, cool down and die, a mere shadow of its former self, and become lost amongst the ghosts of earlier dead stars drifting amid that still unfathomable “dark matter”. This may all seem like eons into the future, bearing in mind that man has been in existence in something like his current incarnation for a mere 200 thousand to 2 million years depending on where you want to start your evolution from, but in the never-ending struggle for survival our species will have needed to have found another safe haven long before our Sun’s death throes commence.

Saturn has perhaps already told and continues to tell us all this; you’re born, you grow, mature, and then wither and die, hopefully purposefully, gracefully and enjoying longevity, perhaps even ending in some blaze of glory, but the end-game itself is never in any doubt. The Moon’s cycles may in some way flatter only to deceive since our physical bodies here on Earth are not designed to regenerate in their entirety. Man’s quest for that elusive elixir of eternal youth has not as yet been satisfied in much the same vein as the alchemists’ midnight furnaces have not revealed that all-consuming precious metal so avariciously desired. An everlasting life cocooned by an Aladdin’s cave of materialistic riches is not our designated role, no matter how many sinews we strain to grasp that false mirage. And if somehow we didn’t, or don’t, get that Saturnian message then Pluto will make no bones about it if and when he delivers the ultimate and inevitable transformation in his own inimitable style.

Life is cyclical and the cosmos we inhabit is a living, breathing, expanding, evolving organism. Those twinkling stars, entire star systems, galaxies even, are created and subsequently torn asunder, some in spectacular supernovae explosions that seed further fledgling star and planet births with newly-forged ‘heavy metals’ borne on the cosmic wind. Here in the universe’s cauldrons of creation is where base metals are truly transmuted into gold and other treasures beyond imagination, some of which our own solar system was the grateful recipient of at its inception. Our Sun is roughly middle-aged and should be in its prime but down here on planet Earth we might well be experiencing something of a minor midlife crisis. How and why did and do we wreak such havoc on this beautiful blue globe that so selflessly sustains us? Has our species an endless history of such similar planetary destruction left behind us out there like the trail of some universal virus?

Whatever the answers to those questions the universal evolutionary processes must and will continue regardless. In any event, there’s an enormous amount of developmental work yet to be accomplished to enable mankind to satisfactorily relocate from this planet.

But where to? A step back in time to ancient Mars perhaps, if indeed Mars is from whence we came? That would of course be the second step for mankind, the Moon as ever is always our first “giant leap”. And there are still many giant hurdles remaining for us to leap through or over before we can get to Mars in the flesh, or rather with our flesh intact if we consider that to be essential. What exactly were the cataclysmic series of happenings that took place on Mars some 5-10 million years ago? A time span that in geological terms would be considered to be very recently indeed. Events of such gigantic proportions that created gorges some hundreds of meters wide and deep and hundreds of kilometres long to be carved out of the landscape by some massive movement of liquid that has subsequently left the planet completely barren, parched and seemingly dead beyond recall. It’s a ghost planet. Why and where did everything, and perhaps everyone, go? So many unresolved questions about the Red Planet the answers to which seem to be tantalisingly drip-fed to us like the very water that is being sought there. Because where there’s water there should or could be life, at least the potential for its existence; past, present or future.

In any event such a relocation to Mars could only be considered a temporary one as our Sun in its final moments is not something we’ll want to be hanging around too near for too long. One planet outwards is really not such a major move, though here and now we might consider it to be one. What we need is another benign host to wrap ourselves around. In the firmament of stars our Sun may not be high up the twinkling pecking order but it does seem to suit us rather well, so perhaps we need to try and find ourselves another similar one. But it turns out that stars like our Sun are not so easy to find after all. It may not be deemed to be something so special in the universal scheme of things but it is in the top 10% of stars, by size that is, and the majority of other stars are a lot smaller and less powerful and don’t have the equivalent chemical composition, the necessary cosmological genes, that we require. And what about all those big bright stars in our night skies up there? Unfortunately, most of the stars we can see in our skies or whose names we have generally heard of are wholly unsuitable since, because they appear to be so big and bright, they actually are too big or too hot or too unstable for us. They are certainly not the right sort of stars to generate and support the ‘habitable zone’ around them that we so badly need.

Across our earthly globe arrays and networks of radio telescopes are trained into deep space straining to pick up the smallest sign of intelligent life anywhere out there. Something or someone to give us a pointer if not a helping hand, any form of assistance would not go amiss. There’s been no signal as yet but the search for extra-terrestrial life (SETI) goes on. Other groups of astroscientists, meanwhile, search for potential terrestrial-like planets orbiting far distant stars in the outer reaches of our galaxy, the ‘Milky Way’, almost as old as the universe itself at over 13 billion years and so-called because its milky white light splashes itself across our celestial sphere.

To date an astonishing two hundred plus extra-solar planets (exoplanets) have been uncovered but the great majority of these are vast Jupiter-type gas super-giants spinning round their suns at incredible speeds. Amazing, but not exactly ready-made for our hoped-for soft landing. The technologies employed to carry out these searches are continuously advancing and last year (2006) came the announcement of the first rocky planet discovered outside of our own solar system. At five and half times the mass of Earth and a pretty chilly -220°C it orbits a dim ‘red dwarf’ over 20,000 light years away. The search continues for somewhere a little more hospitable.

While most of the discovered objects to-date seem to orbit far-distant stars with somewhat obscure names it may be interesting to learn that a familiar bright star in our night skies has been found to have a body in orbit around it. Pollux, one of the celebrated celestial twins of Greek myth, immortal brother to the mortal Castor, sons of Zeus and Tyndareos respectively, both born of Leda, brothers to the infamous Helen of Troy, who was the great prize offered to Paris to judge the ‘beauty contest’ after Eris had tossed her “apple of discord” into the wedding party of Peleus and Thetis from which she had been excluded and the cause of the chain of events that gave rise to the subsequent Trojan War, the brightest star in the constellation Gemini, the 17th brightest star in our heavens and a mere 34 light years away, has a close companion planet. It might be massive and Jupiter-like and whizzing round its parent in an almost circular 590-day orbit but it’s somehow reassuring to be able to look up into the night skies and know that other worlds, even if incompatible with our own, are possibly that much closer than we might have imagined.

Gemini, a winter night-time constellation, is becoming visible once more in our night skies so why not take a peek one night soon yourself. Pollux is the more yellowy, being a ‘yellow-orange giant’ star, and the lower left of the bright pair.

[The bright orangey-red planet Mars is currently making his way towards that very spot in the night sky. The night sky maps in the Planetwatch section following will enable you to locate the particular area and you can use the ancient warrior god as your guide. A helpful hint: planets shine but stars twinkle.]

Incredible star-birth chambers exist all over our galaxy and beyond, fuzzy little patches of dim light in our dark skies that belie their unbelievably immense size and power. Our solar system is located towards the outside of the inner rim of the so-called ‘Orion Arm’ of our ‘giant barred-spiral galaxy’. In the night skies you can spot the cloudy Milky Way drift past the eastern side of the unmistakeable constellation of Orion. That giant of an asterism that bestrides the cold winter nights in our heavens above is a veritable treasure trove of new birth, and perhaps even re-birth. Extending below the line of three bright stars that are the well-known ‘belt of Orion’, the alignment of which the three great ancient Egyptian pyramids at Giza are thought to mirror, is a little line of light that is referred to as ‘Orion’s Sword’ comprising what appears to be three smaller bright stars.

The brightest patch in the heart of this ‘sword’ is not a single star but the Orion Nebula, historically known as the Great Nebula, designated as Messier object 42 (M42), and is in fact a star nursery of astonishing proportions. There are countless young, vibrant, incandescent stars inside this vast cloud of superheated hydrogen gas and dust, a classic indicator of potential solar system formation.

Orion was of paramount importance to the ancient Egyptians as the heavenly representation of their most significant deity Osiris, Lord of their Underworld, the God of new life, new birth, of re-birth, reincarnation, and symbolising the dead king, the deceased Pharaoh, father to the living Pharaoh. Orion rises over the eastern horizon as if lying backwards. As he rises further and higher he appears almost to slowly stand upright, as if perchance being reborn, as if this is Osiris reincarnating as his son Horus, of whom the Pharaoh is his earthly form. “The King is dead, long live the King”.

We generally see and read of Orion as the Greek ‘hunter’ with bow and arrow or shield and club or sword, lots of fighting equipment to hand as it were. But if this giant in the sky is viewed as that uniquely iconic ancient Egyptian deity then there possibly is a further inherent layer of potency. Put aside all the personal armoury and what you are left with is the celestial symbol of a man, of whatever status, clothed in the style of that time in a loose short-skirted type of garment with a belt around his middle. So what would that fuzzy line of light below his belt be seen as? A sword? A sash? The loose end of his belt?

The most potent symbols of many ancient civilisations are those of fertility, both male and female. And to the ancient Egyptians the most potent of all of these was the male phallus, the very symbol of creation itself, worshipped as a god in its own right as Tatenen, the “personification of the phallus of the dead king”. And in the Osiris myth, Isis, his sister and “wife”, hovers above the artificial, hand-fashioned phallus of the mummified Osiris to somehow miraculously conceive Horus. If the Egyptians saw Orion rising in the night sky as the dead Osiris reincarnating into his son Horus then perhaps that bright glow beneath the belt of those heavenly gods was seen as that most powerful celestial symbol of fertility, the phallus of the dead Osiris creating new life.

 And in the bright cloudy Orion Nebula there are not just new star formations taking place but whole new solar systems are incarnating before our very eyes with four very bright white stars at its centre referred to as the ‘Trapezium’. It is indeed then a highly fertile visible region in our night skies.

Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the sky, is represented as the Milky Way who’s soft and wispy-white body, teeming with a billion star systems, arches across the heavens in a protective embrace and re-births the Sun god Ra at every new dawn and at every winter solstice to symbolise the Sun’s daily and annual cycles. Orion rises in the east before the bright star Sirius, lying below as well as behind. Sirius, the celestial personification of Isis, the most significant of all stars to the ancient Egyptians, herald of the annual refertilisation of the lands adjoining the Nile, is the brightest of all the stars in our heavens above. Ancient civilisations wove their creation myths around the natural world they inhabited. And the gods that appeared most noticeably in that mysterious nightly firmament above were more often than not the most potent as well as the most revered.

Last year it was revealed just how many potential exoplanets there might be in our galaxy. Late in 2006, as Pluto transited the Galactic Centre at 26° of Sagittarius (tropically), came the results of a Hubble Space Telescope probe into the very heart of our galaxy, normally shrouded by inter-stellar gas and dust. The project, SWEEPS (Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search), looked into the central bulge of the Milky Way, the very womb of the ancient sky goddess Nut, and in just one tiny section found a possible sixteen new planets. That may not seem that many but when you extrapolate that figure across the entire galaxy it suggests there may be billions of planets out there. And that’s just in our local galaxy, one of possibly many billions of galaxies in this expanding universe. The probability of there being that other similar colour-coded grain of sand on the beach, so to speak, has risen that much higher. The future prospects for our species are beginning to look increasingly brighter, and possibly even more sunny.

We may not be alone after all.

Planetwatch

Meanwhile, back in the here and now, and with our feet firmly planted on this orbiting third rock out from Sol, our Sun, let’s take a look at what’s happening in the real-time ‘heavens above’ as we gracefully, and perhaps even gratefully, revolve on our for-the-time-being-anyway magic roundabout spinning through space.

In the UK there is that long-dreaded end of British Summer Time at the end of the month, on the 28th, to look forward to when the clocks go back by 1 hour (…fall back). The evenings have been getting noticeably shorter and colder already and it’s only a matter of time before the onset of that familiar winter lockdown but it still comes as quite a shock to the system nonetheless. Of course it’s an absolute marvel for stargazing as the rich dark velvet night skies of late autumn and winter make for magical viewing of our star-studded celestial umbrella. And, lest we forget, from an astrologer’s perspective it also means no longer having to remember to think about whether to add or subtract an hour when looking in the ephemeris, for which there might be a small but significant sigh of relief all round.

As for our companion planetary bodies the tale of two horizons from last month follows on into this but it’s the rising one in the east that quite clearly begins to take precedence.

MERCURY is one of the stragglers over to the setting west in the evening twilight as the month of October opens. Even though he reached greatest eastern elongation at the end of last month he was too low down to the horizon to be readily visible as an evening object and this theme continues for the first half of this month. MERCURY hovers on the western horizon at dusk but the Sun is relentlessly drawing him in piece at a time. He’s in the shy constellation of Virgo and strain at the Sun’s leash as he might he just about touches the borders of the constellation Libra with his fingertips before his resistance as well his resolve desert him and he succumbs to the inevitable retrograde motion on the 12th of the month, sliding gently back into the arms of the Virgin in the sky as the month unfolds.

Tropically this is taking place with MERCURY initially in the zodiacal sign of Scorpio and eventually retrograding backwards into the sign of Libra by the end of the month. Even though modern tropical astrology takes no proper account of the physical and visible positioning of the planets as seen against the background stars and constellations (ancient or modern) the sky is still trying to communicate something consequential. What exactly that something is requires more careful and prudent consideration because to deny that useful information is to deny an additional level of valuable interpretation. Too much modern astrology, or rather the modern practitioners of it, has already been relocated to the ‘not visible’ at the expense of the visual astronomy from which the art was originally derived. A re-integration of this facet is entirely necessary, and perhaps already overdue, before another connection to the source gets blurred around the edges and subsequently lost, more probably in confusion than anything else.

Anyway, MERCURY, passing through inferior conjunction on the night of the 23rd/24th then begins to quickly stretch out from the Sun in the opposite direction and rather surprisingly pops up fleetingly as a morning star in the east at the very end of October, just to the left of and slightly higher in the pre-dawn sky than Virgo’s bright star Spica, the ‘ear of corn’, turning direct in motion once more on the very 1st day of next month. When you think you should be able to spot him on one horizon you can’t, and then he shows up on the opposite one when you weren’t quite expecting it, what a little trickster! Still, he probably got bored and realised that all the real action was over in the east and he wanted to get on over and pick up on all the goss’, and who can blame him. If he’s not in the thick of it he gets very restless indeed and starts behaving like some mini-maverick.

VENUS, meanwhile, has been holding court in the east in the hours before dawn for some while now. Rising over three hours before the Sun at the beginning of the month she is a brilliantly shining beacon seen against the season’s darkening skies. Having retired from all companionship during the summer months and wandered off to less familiar celestial territories, she has rediscovered that old razzle-dazzle of hers. The roads less travelled have provided the opportunity for personal re-invention and now with confidence anew she moves further in towards the ecliptic and the third close encounter of the year with the seven-ringed circusmaster, steady as you go SATURN, in the early hours of the 14th.

If their first meeting at the beginning of July was perhaps a little too close for comfort, the second in mid August was so far apart as to hardly be a conjunction at all, more like strangers passing on opposite sides of the street. The third and final liaison of this year’s series is a highly cordial affair. At just short of 3° separation, with both positioned neatly either side of the ecliptic, SATURN above, VENUS below, it is quite close enough for a warm exchange but not so close as to be suffocatingly uncomfortable for either party, very nicely done indeed. All is once more in order and life can now move on.

VENUS is back on song, as well as back on the yellow-brick road that is the ecliptic, and revitalised by this renewed surety of purpose she stretches herself out to fully 46° west of the Sun, her position of greatest elongation, on the 28th, by which time she is rising some four hours before the dawn engulfs her, with a greatest elevation above the horizon of some 40° or so. Now that’s what you’d call a Morning Star, showy or what?

Back to the straight and narrow, oft-times grumpy old SATURN, who for such an interminable length of time has seemed to be trailing along in VENUS’s wake, from night sky admirer to daytime dreamer to morning star moper, starts the month floundering in her pre-dawn slipstream but after their cosy little one-to-one and the re-establishing of entente-cordial mid month gives the old bones a good shake-out and by month’s end he’s rising an hour or so before the great dame, some five hours before the Sun, and is beginning his move into the night skies for the long winter’s sojourn, his normally dull yellow glow glinting with a resurgent vim and vigour.

Higher up in the darkened sky is rapidly emboldening MARS who arrives before the midnight hour at the beginning of the month and as early as mid-evening at month’s close. Having carved his way through the horns of the bull last month, of the constellation Taurus that is, he marches right on into the constellation of Gemini this month and, boldly going where no sensible person would attempt to go, plonks his ruddy body right in the middle of the collective limbs of those celestial Siamese twins – ouch! As he’s now in the tropical sign of Cancer he’s supposed to be doing his touchy feely routine but sticking yourself between a man and his immortal counterpart effectively joined at the hip won’t exactly endear you to either, besides which it is an entirely uncomfortable experience for all concerned and is quite clearly MARS behaving at his not very best i.e. badly.

Subtlety wouldn’t seem to be a Martian strongpoint but then again when you’ve seen his vibrant red body located in the whole constellation of Scorpius, and not just the top half of it that we see up in our more northerly latitudes, and above Antares, the ‘rival of Mars’, the bright red star in the constellation where JUPITER has been positioned for some months now, you get an entirely different feel for that other side of MARS; there’s still the strength but now with added depth, a more concentrated and perhaps a more subtle and determined power, not the crash-bash routine he’s been giving us just recently. We’re on a collision course, him and us here on Earth, or at least that’s how it might be appearing, as MARS grows noticeably bigger and brighter in our night skies as the month unfolds.

The aforementioned JUPITER has spent the entire summer riding the Scorpion for all its worth and now he’s beginning to tire of it. He can still be seen in the early evening in the west just after the Sun has gone down, setting about three hours after the Sun which then progressively reduces down to just shortly after twilight time as the month takes its course. All good things must come to an end it would seem and JUPITER, being very much a warm weather traveller these days, is off to find more comfortable climes for the winter, dismounting from the Scorpion and moving off in search of some new adventure somewhere over yon distant western horizon, that’s very nearly the last we’ll see of him for this year.

Soon the western evening horizon will be quite bereft of visible planets and the ever sinking winter Sun will be making that long journey towards re-birth and renewal on his own, save for the passing attendance of his close companion Moon to transport him in his night time solar barque.

As they say, we come into the world alone and we leave it the same way. The Sun, our radiant life-giver, according to the ancient Egyptians, dies every evening and is reborn the next dawn “younger than the day before”. There’s hope for us yet.

© A.S.Morton – October 2007