Astrology Quarterly - Astronomy - Heavens Above

A S Morton

Heavens Above - May 2008

You can almost hear the cogs and gears grinding and clunking. So opens our merry spring month of May with a celestial happening that is more akin to the universal mechanical model of Descartes than Newton in its clamouring and crunching vibration, the effects of which, regardless of whether you subscribe to Addey-style waveforms or nay, cannot but be sensed beyond the incessant buzzing distractions of human life on our soporifically spinning ‘magic roundabout’, planet Earth. “How irritatingly unseasonable!” you may well proclaim, and you would of course be right and yet wrong both at the same time.

SATURN, he begarbed of the gaudy hula-hoop rings, is changing direction in our ‘heavens above’, which is somewhat similar to one of those vintage steamrollers that always seem to reappear during the summer months trying to do a u-turn in a country lane, not an easy task as one can but euphemistically think. May 3rd at 04:06 BST is the date and time of the station point when he is poised momentarily between retrograde and direct motion and perhaps for that merest fraction there is a kind of anticipatory hush all over our world.

We’ve endured over four months of SATURN retrograde since just prior to last year’s winter solstice and all of this year to date has so far been accompanied by a reversing SATURN, coming back almost to the very beginning of the tropical sign of Virgo which he crossed into in early September of 2007. That’s not been an easy period for virtually everyone to live through, in at least some area of life, and even though he’s going to take a little while yet to get up the proverbial ‘head of steam’ at long last some of the pressure that’s been building will slowly start to dissipate over the coming weeks and months.

Up in the ‘heavens above’ this has all been on-going beneath the lion in the sky, Leo, and if you look up into the night skies you can see just how close Saturn has come to Leo’s primary star Regulus, Saturn being the bright shining one to the left and Regulus the not-so-bright twinkling one to the right. They’re only just over a degree apart at the beginning of May and you can test this by holding your index finger up at arm’s length, your finger should just nicely fill the gap between the two. And that is one of the oldest methods of astronomical measurement known to man, the digit. Of course it depends on the width of your finger but 1° is the approximate measure of an average index finger extended at arms length.

A clenched fist held at arm’s length, with the thumb tucked in, is approximately 10° across which is and has been one of the most useful measures of distance between celestial objects. It is the basis of the Ancient Egyptian ‘decan’ by which they used the passage of groupings of stars ten degrees apart to measure time, mainly stars just to the south of the ecliptic rather than the ecliptic constellations from which we derive our tropical astrological signs, even though some sections of those are also south of the ecliptic and are in part incorporated into the Ancient Egyptian system.

The Ancient Chaldeans also apparently used a system of decans, although quite how similar the two were, if at all, is open to some speculation. However, to be able to measure objects and their distances in the skies using just one’s hands, and without the necessity for sophisticated measuring equipment, is, if you’ll excuse the pun, very handy indeed which is how and why these systems were derived in the first place, from a simple sense of practicality and not the overly-complicated reasons our post-Greek western, so-called ‘logical’, minds do somehow contrive them to sometimes be. And how convenient that 10° is a neat divisor of 30° and therefore 360°. The original system of decimalisation, perchance?

Anyway, SATURN, to the Ancient Egyptians, ‘Horus: the Bull of the Sky’, is the dullish yellow bright object almost overhead in the early hours of darkness and is not to be confused with the even brighter, but twinkling, orangey-yellow Arcturus seemingly overhead at the midnight hour. Arcturus ‘the bear-driver’ of the kite-like constellation Boötes is the brightest star in our heavens at this time of the year and can be located by using the familiar ‘Plough’ stars of the circumpolar constellation of Ursa Major. Taking the three bright stars of the handle of the Plough, follow that curve round and down and the bright object you very soon come to is Arcturus, standing proudly overhead to proclaim our northern season of Spring.

Arcturus’ lovely yellow-orange colour unfortunately tells us that this is a dying star, it’s core of hydrogen is all but spent and the outer layer has become puffed up and distended outwards, a fate that awaits our own Sun in another five or so billion years from now, something we won’t want to be around to be watching if we’re going to survive beyond our current host star.

Much further over to the northeast from Arcturus another bright twinkling light beckons but this one is fresh and white and youthful. Vega of the constellation Lyra and the lead star of the ‘summer triangle’ heralds the promise that balmier days and nights are just around a few diurnal corners.

On the other side of the sky, toward the setting horizon in the west, and visible as soon as darkness falls, is a neat little grouping of three similarly bright objects, not quite in a line but bent somewhat like a boomerang. Look closer and you might notice that the two to the right are in fact twinkling but the one on the left of the trio is shining, not very brightly it’s true, but shining he still is. MARS is chummying up to those Gemini boys. Having spent the last seven or so months in some sort of war of attrition with almost anything and anyone who happened to be in the vicinity all now seems quieter on that particular western front.

MARS has been behaving badly for quite some time now and it comes as something of a welcome relief that better, if not common, sense appears to be at long last prevailing. The reasons for all this bad behaviour are multiple, not only has MARS spent much of that time in his ‘fall’ in the tropical sign of Cancer but he has also been through his biennial period of retrogradation and he hasn’t liked that one little bit. Added to which he has been all this while ‘out-of-bounds’ and therefore, without the stabilising influence of the solar path, the ecliptic, to guide and lead him, his behaviour has been wilfully mischievous and very antagonistic indeed.

An ‘out-of-bounds’ planet is one where its declination, the measure of its vertical height up or down, if you like, relative to the celestial equator, the terrestrial equator extrapolated out into space, is beyond the maximum N or S that the Sun extends on its annual journey i.e. 23.5° N or S. MARS has been out-of-bounds for nearly seven months, which is a pretty long time for wreaking the utmost havoc and MARS needs little or no second invitation for such fun and games, as he might liken it to be.

An ‘out-of-bounds’ generally occurs across the signs of Gemini and Cancer and the equivalent southerly signs of Sagittarius and Capricorn, whilst in the sky these will appear against the constellations of Taurus and Gemini and their hemispherical counterparts of Scorpius and Sagittarius. Our MOON is quite often out-of-bounds in its path around our Earth which can heighten the impact of its passage at that time, usually for just a day or so.

Well, he’s being a very good boy now, if MARS could ever be described as being a ‘good boy', as he’s moved himself within the acceptable boundaries of the ‘yellow-brick road’ that is the ecliptic and as if to show willing, as it were, he then proceeds to form a neat line with the celestial twins, Castor and Pollux, all three abreast, just to show there’s no hard feelings after a winter’s fill of running battles, albeit mostly of heightened emotional verbiage, before dashing off to the nearest vacant celestial spot otherwise known as the constellation of Cancer. Shape-up or ship-out, they say! He’s certainly done enough of the fighting for a while so now it’s a touch of the flighting.

JUPITER, the middle planet of the visible outers, although middling is hardly a term our over-inflated, self-proclaimed ‘Lord of the Skies’ would accept as an apt or appropriate description of his regal status, is at last taking on more the appearance that he would claim as his birthright, that of night skies cruiser. Rising before midnight by month’s end low down in the southeast his elevation remains a little derisory due to his being in the region of the southern constellations where he’s been hanging about for the last couple of years and will remain for a year or two more, presently in the constellation of Sagittarius

If Sagittarius is deemed to be his very own fiefdom, putting aside the question (which really is no question at all) of Pisces just for the moment, and even taking account of the fact that when the system we know was devised the constellations and tropical signs pretty much coincided, it does seem somewhat strange that he would have inherited a place in space that was so apparently low slung, hardly somewhere to soar and preen as we are led to believe. However, if you move yourself further south to where it all was put together on the southern side of the Mediterranean sea, North Africa that is, which is still north of the equator, then everything lifts up into the visible sky so much more than we can appreciate up here in our mid-northern latitudes. All of a sudden JUPITER is way up in the skies soaring and preening like a good ‘un, and so much more jolly and expansive for it.

Of course we could say that being in the tropical sign of Capricorn is a major factor that’s weighing him down, like some Jumbo jet with the fullest of payloads struggling to take off, but that wouldn’t account for last year’s similarly low position in our skies when he was in the tropical sign of Sagittarius. Unfortunately you can’t quite have your cake and eat it on this one, although one suspects that JUPITER would always expect to do so regardless. Anyway, he’s going to be hanging about up there for a while now as he stations and slowly turns retrograde on the 9th of the month.

Our inner planets, MERCURY and VENUS, are being rather elusive at the moment, VENUS still being too close in to the Sun to be visible and quite possibly indulging in a spot of R & R on a tropical cruise or suchlike, perhaps preparing for her forthcoming summer show, a seaside special par excellence, or so the advance publicity is apparently suggesting.

MERCURY on the other hand does a quick mid-month dash to greatest elongation east of the Sun on the 14th of the month, at 22°E not exactly one of his longest but long enough for the purpose, and is just about glimpsable very low down on a clear-ish northwestern horizon immediately after sunset, before being steadily drawn back in towards the Sun and ending the month retrograde.

Just when you might have thought that your planetary troubles were easing up for a while, what with both MARS and SATURN direct again, which really is something of a bonus whatever else is going on in our ‘heavens above’, then not only does JUPITER turn retrograde but that little back-slider MERCURY is off on one of his as well. Such are the joys of planetary cycles; nothing is ever seemingly quite perfection from a geocentric perspective, although if it were then perhaps we might have been at the very centre of the universe after all. Thanks Copernicus!

© A.S.Morton – April 2008