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| Home | Stargazer | About | Contact | Updated 03 July, 2005
TATLER readers - Do come in, darlings!
Let's hear it for SEDNA, aka 2003 VB12, the 'tenth planet'.
What
sign is Sedna in?
Where is Sedna now? 18 degrees of Taurus.
2003 VB12 's official discovery date is 14 November 2003 at Palomar, California, natch. SEDNA was almost exactly at 18 degrees of Taurus. This frosty, faraway freelancer is still hanging around the 17th and 18th degrees of Taurus...and will do for quite some time...she's a slow poke.
How did we find what zodiac sign SEDNA was in, so fast? The same way we've always leapt to calculate the zodiac positions of the exoplanets.
It's cool! It's quick! It's easy! Here's how you do it:
Find the astronomical name of your new planet, KBO, exoplanet, black hole, etc. (Example: 2003 VB12).
Jump onto the search engine Google. Type your new planet's name in and also add: RA . (This stands for Right Ascension, which is one of 'the measuring tapes' or belts astronomers use to locate anything anywhere in space. Astrologers use a different measurement called celestial longitude.) So type in: SEDNA RA or, better: 2003 VB12 RA Click!
Google will offer you a tasty selection of websites that list the RA (location, or x-axis) of your new baby planet. Visit a few, until you find your planet's RA and DEC, which is the Declination (the up and down tape measure, or y-axis for you boffins). The DEC comes with a plus or minus sign. Write these two down exactly as you see them listed, with the gaps, the RA and the DEC, + or -. (Example: after poking around, you can find easily that 2003 VB12 has RA 03 h 15 m 10 s (hours, minutes, seconds) and DEC + 05d 38 m 15 s (degrees, minutes, seconds).
Now rush to NED. This is the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, love.
NED is your robotic friend. Go to INPUT parameters. At SYSTEM, choose EQUATORIAL. Go to the far right on the same line, and click on the rectangular button labeled SET J2000.0 Yes! Click it now! Next, where it says RA or Longitude, fill in the blank. (Example: 03 15 10 ). Do the same with DEC or Latitude. (Example: + 05 38 15 ). Don't forget to put the plus or minus in front of your numbers here. Next, go to OUTPUT Parameters. At SYSTEM, choose ECLIPTIC. Go to the far right on the same line, and click on the rectangular button labeled SET J2000.0 Just do it. Now....just click the button labeled CALCULATE.
AHA! YOUR ANSWER IS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS. It's all the way to the left where it says OUTPUT: Ecliptic J2000.0 (Example: It's showing 47.91552829. That's in decimals, not hours, minutes and seconds, so call it 48.) The signs of the zodiac run in a circle, and have 30 degrees each. Aries = 0 degrees, Taurus equals 30 degrees, ergo, 48 degrees is 30 degrees for Taurus plus 18 more, voila! - 18 degrees of Taurus. Geddit? That's why we have robots to do these things for us. So next time you hear of Something New Out There, you can find out where it is, fast. No waiting and wondering. Happy exploring, planetary pioneers. Let us hear from you when you're checking out results! Byeee!
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PROLOGUE:
This article first appeared on the Internet on 22 February 1996 on
Zane Stein's website.
Find him by clicking here
Re: NEW WORLDS
New planets and/or planetlike companions have been discovered orbiting the following stars:
51 PEGASI 22 degrees PISCES 50' 55'' Now known to be 24 Pisces 16' 47" (First Discovery) Latitude 25 N 05' 49"
47 URSA MAJORIS 27 degrees LEO 58' 55" Now known to be 29 Leo 04' 32" Latitude 30 N 33' 48"
70 VIRGINIS 13 degrees LIBRA 37' 05" Now known to be 14 Libra 58' 14" Latitude 21 N 14' 34"Zodiacal Positions: 1 January 2000
Zane Stein obtained positions for the new solar systems from astronomy sources on the Internet. Right Ascension positions are here converted to Celestial Longitude
(zodiac positions) courtesy of Rique Pottenger and Maritha Pottenger at Astro Communications Services in San Diego.
Pop these new solar systems into horoscopes as you would any planet. Unlike our near planets, these far-aways will not move from these positions during a human lifespan. You may, however, note transits, progressions, solar arcs directions, tight angles, etc. to these points. Let us hear your observations!
Our solar system is no longer the whole ball o' wax. A "new worlds" order approaches.
Keep staring into space!
Zane Stein and I will be publishing more information of these phenomena shortly.
Debbi Kempton-Smith New York
What the Gang at the Galactic Garage Are Saying...
Ordo Novum Seculorum...Talk about the New World Order! Got us three new solar systems in the shop here in just as many months, Danny boy, see how they glow!
Nuthin' near the like ever happened to Earth folk before, seems we were always
the only solar system around this town--only one we ever needed, if you ask me!--
and suddenly BANG! we got us a THANG hummin' and buzzin' over by the gate there,
and we gotta DEAL with it, like it or not, and from what I been hearin', some of these astrologers don't like it one little bit.
Some good ol' astrology boys been sayin' these new planets and solar systems out there are too far away to do anything much to earth people's horoscopes. But didn't them wild and crazy physics fellers find that the 'weak force' is the glue of the universe, and that the farther away a thing is, the stronger its effect? Ain't Pluto the pit bull of our solar system, meaner than a junkyard dog and father away from our sweet Earth than Hell itself?
I confess, my friends, I hardly know what to think about this new mess astrologers are going to have to handle now and worse to come: other solar systems! New planets! More comets! To think we astrologers used to be so back-woords-bigoted we wouldn't even study comets, until that sneaky maverick, Chiron, showed up in November '77. We didn't know it was a comet back in them days, figured it was a small planet, or somethin', an asteroid way off its path maybe. Zane Stein and Al Morrison launched a worldwide research and info pooling project to find out fast what Chiron might mean in horoscopes and in global events. And study it to death we did, finding it linked with healing, pregnancy, the Human Genome project, you name it, Zane Stein can tell you all about that. By the time in 1990 astronomers found out Chiron was a comet, a mere dirty snowball, astrologers had to confront a collective bias against studying anything outside the established old order.
Now comes Uranus hitting Aquarius (January '96) and Pluto entering Sagittarius (November '95) and astrology is forced to expand, observe, research, rethink, and adjust to this new, unsettling, foreign data.
If horoscopes are 'frozen snapshots' of our solar system at a particular moment, and the art and language of astrology are based on the shape of our solar system, shall future horoscopes include symbols for other, faraway solar systems?
28 August 1996
Will horoscopes of the future go to three dimensions and be read spherically, holographic images, like 3-D chess? Already we note parallels, declinations, parans.
Will horoscopes fifty , a hundred, 300 years from now be Earth centred , Sun centred, Areocentric, centred round something else?
Will we keep the zodiac and our home solar system as our smaller 'picture frame',
enclosed in a larger picture frame? And what should that larger picture frame be?
How much longer will astrology to continue to base itself on the present zodiac, the 'circle of animals' traced by the apparent path of the Sun along the plane of the ecliptic? Even with computers, it will take years to collect observations and to form theoretical and working models of these new phenomena.
Brilliant scientific discoveries are about to rush in on us, forcing us to adapt to and to acknowledge that our solar system is a dear , though suddenly picayune, enclave in a much larger neighbourhood.
An interesting theoretical model may come from examining the Galactic Plane, the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live. For now, until we have a grasp of where we fit in say, the plane of the Local Group of galaxies, the Milky Way galaxy may give astrologers a larger picture frame with which to work, thus adding a third dimension, the missing z-axis, to the horoscopes of the future. Astrologers will need plenty more room and new grids in which to plop in the huge coming influx of newly discovered distant planets, solar systems and other bodies in our home galaxy.
More solar systems have been discovered recently. Watch this space! Astronomers and astrologers, let us hear from you!
Copyright 1996 Debbi Kempton-Smith Islamorada
(from The Astronomical Companion by Guy Ottewell, used with permission)
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