this is a public service announcement
YOUR SIGN IS STILL YOUR SIGN, PEOPLE.
People have known for a really long time that the astronomical and astrological zodiacs do not line up. Old news, Hipparchus figured this out in like 130 BCE.
The astronomical zodiac refers to the actual, physical position of the sun, the earth, and the stars in terms of the eliptic. The eliptic is the path that the sun appears to travel throughout the year, and is demarcated by the International Astronomical Union with a coordinate system named after 12 (er, actually 13, but we'll get to that in a minute) constellations. Like, okay, sure, if you went outside at high noon tomorrow and could flip an imaginary switch and turn off the sun for a minute and see the stars like you can at night, you would see that the sun in fact would appear to be in the middle of the constellation of Sagittarius. This is the basis of the sidereal zodiac, which can be affected by the very slow, very gradual precession (wobble) of the earth's axis, causing the drift effect that has been reported on for the last couple days. Interesting note: about 2200 years ago, when Hellenistic and Vedic astrology broke up, the Vedic system adopted a version of the sidereal zodiac, so yeah, if you asked a fortune-teller in Mumbai or Jaipur or Jackson Heights, you might have a different sign, too.
But you notice, people at parties don't ask, "What's your constellation?" They ask, "What's your sign?" This is because the astrological zodiac, on the other hand, is a sort of fudged, made-up relative division of the path of the sun into twelve equal zones of celestial longitude (or signs) named after the twelve traditional constellations. These zones are calibrated to the solstices and equinoxes each year. Did you ever notice that the first day of Aries is always the spring equinox? This system is known as the tropical zodiac, and because it's calibrated to the equinox, it has moves with the earth's precession. Astrologically speaking, the sun is currently in Capricorn -- or rather, it's not really in Capricorn right now so much as it's in "Capricorn."
And as for Ophiuchus, this "new" 13th snake-wrangling sign, well, I don't care about him. When the Babylonians were cooking up what we have come to know as astrology, for a while there were like 50 signs, and then they narrowed it down to like 18, but then they settled on 12, because 12 is a good even number with nifty numerological significance (can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, for instance.)
If you wanna nerd out on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession_of_the_equinoxes
But, I mean, why fuck with 3000-years-old-woo, you know?
ETA: After I posted this, someone forwarded me a much more erudite, complete and in-depth article about this by Rob Breszny and Jai Maharaj, which is definitely worth a look. Though I disagree with their characterization of Parke Kunkle's remarks as "ravings" -- I'd like to give Kunkle and the Minnesota Planetarium Society the benefit of the doubt and think that this was a random off-the-cuff that got picked up and took off -- it nevertheless makes for interesting reading if you're into this.
People have known for a really long time that the astronomical and astrological zodiacs do not line up. Old news, Hipparchus figured this out in like 130 BCE.
The astronomical zodiac refers to the actual, physical position of the sun, the earth, and the stars in terms of the eliptic. The eliptic is the path that the sun appears to travel throughout the year, and is demarcated by the International Astronomical Union with a coordinate system named after 12 (er, actually 13, but we'll get to that in a minute) constellations. Like, okay, sure, if you went outside at high noon tomorrow and could flip an imaginary switch and turn off the sun for a minute and see the stars like you can at night, you would see that the sun in fact would appear to be in the middle of the constellation of Sagittarius. This is the basis of the sidereal zodiac, which can be affected by the very slow, very gradual precession (wobble) of the earth's axis, causing the drift effect that has been reported on for the last couple days. Interesting note: about 2200 years ago, when Hellenistic and Vedic astrology broke up, the Vedic system adopted a version of the sidereal zodiac, so yeah, if you asked a fortune-teller in Mumbai or Jaipur or Jackson Heights, you might have a different sign, too.
But you notice, people at parties don't ask, "What's your constellation?" They ask, "What's your sign?" This is because the astrological zodiac, on the other hand, is a sort of fudged, made-up relative division of the path of the sun into twelve equal zones of celestial longitude (or signs) named after the twelve traditional constellations. These zones are calibrated to the solstices and equinoxes each year. Did you ever notice that the first day of Aries is always the spring equinox? This system is known as the tropical zodiac, and because it's calibrated to the equinox, it has moves with the earth's precession. Astrologically speaking, the sun is currently in Capricorn -- or rather, it's not really in Capricorn right now so much as it's in "Capricorn."
And as for Ophiuchus, this "new" 13th snake-wrangling sign, well, I don't care about him. When the Babylonians were cooking up what we have come to know as astrology, for a while there were like 50 signs, and then they narrowed it down to like 18, but then they settled on 12, because 12 is a good even number with nifty numerological significance (can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, for instance.)
If you wanna nerd out on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession_of_the_equinoxes
But, I mean, why fuck with 3000-years-old-woo, you know?
ETA: After I posted this, someone forwarded me a much more erudite, complete and in-depth article about this by Rob Breszny and Jai Maharaj, which is definitely worth a look. Though I disagree with their characterization of Parke Kunkle's remarks as "ravings" -- I'd like to give Kunkle and the Minnesota Planetarium Society the benefit of the doubt and think that this was a random off-the-cuff that got picked up and took off -- it nevertheless makes for interesting reading if you're into this.