WEEKLY WHINE

Welcome to the party

Thanks for joining us, everyone. Putting aside the question of whether astrology is bullshit [which it obviously is], those of us who have any familiarity with astronomy know that the traditional signs of the zodiac do not actually correspond with where the Sun appears to be, as viewed from Earth, on the date you were born. This is caused by Earth’s equatorial bulge and the Sun’s and Moon’s gravitational pull on it causing a torque. As a result, Earth’s axis of rotation precesses around a point in the constellation of Draco. In turn, because Earth’s axis, and therefore its equator, are moving, the equinoxes – the points at which the celestial equator and ecliptic cross – are also moving.

This all means that whilst the Sun appeared in Aries at the vernal equinox in Ptolemaic Egypt, the vernal equinox has been located in Pisces for more than two thousand years – hence the Age of Pisces. Per the constellation boundaries defined by the International Astronomical Union, the vernal equinox will enter Aquarius sometime around AD 2600.

So the question is: Have your newspaper horoscopes been wrong this whole time? And the answer is: Who cares? Your newspaper horoscopes are for entertainment only, as the disclaimers so often claim. In fact, many horoscope writers specifically choose to ignore precession when determining signs. They even have a name for this: the tropical system or the western system. If precession is taken into account, it is the sidereal system or the Vedic system.

Even so, there is nothing inherently meaningful about the constellations to begin with. They are simply arbitrary divisions of areas of the sky. Does it matter that the area that astrologers call Scorpio does not correspond to the area that astronomers call Scorpius? Antares and the globular cluster M4, separated by only about 1.5 degrees of arc in Earth’s sky, are in fact about 2,000 parsecs away from each other. We group them into the same constellation simply because it takes little effort to point a telescope from one to the other.

Indeed, the best advice you could possibly receive is from Kay Taylor, a writer on an astrology website. Rather than simply reading the entry that has your birthday in the heading, she suggests taking the whole process less seriously: “Make choices you love! The symbols will follow.”

To put it another way: Astrology is a made up system of rules that does not correspond to the Universe around you. Glad we could clear that up.