Gist of the Gemini

Astrology, which is Greek for the study of the stars , is a misnomer . Astronomy, Greek for the naming of the stars , is really the study of the stars. Historically, planets were called wandering stars . Astrological charts are actually geocentric maps of our solar system.  And they are essentially Gravity Maps with substantial annotations concerning gravitational wake interactions. (AKA aspects and transits.) Space agencies just need to learn how to use that existing wealth of information about our solar system as a navigational tool. Hiring a professional Astrologer (ideally, one familiar with the math -- which is substantial if you calculate charts by hand -- and not just the personality profile lore) and a sailor experienced with sailed vessels can help you figure that out. It's a little like how historically Ben Franklin tracked water temperature every time he crossed the Atlantic Ocean and thereby mapped a warm channel of water. My recollection is that ships that had that i...

Astrology means the study of the stars. Astronomy means the naming of the stars. Astrology is a word linguistically similar to ecology or biology or archeology. Those are all respected sciences and astrology has come to be seen as a kind of carney act. Part of the problem here is that astrology isn't really the study of the stars and it never was. Astrology is the study of how nearby heavenly bodies that share our solar system impact life here on Earth via gravity. Historically, the planets visible to the naked eye were called wandering stars. So people studying the night sky didn't initially have a mental framework for distinguishing planets from stars. They were all just points of light in the nighttime sky. It was only after we invented telescopes that we began making a clear distinction between planets and stars. Astrological charts are gravity maps of important bodies within our solar system. The only star they really study is the one Earth revolves around: Our Sun.

The name of this site is from an album  I was gifted as a teenager entirely because I was born under the Sun Sign Gemini.  I had not previously heard of the artist, Gino Vannelli, and it wasn't a genre of music I was into or anything like that. I did end up liking the album.  At least in theory I'm a Gemini. My understanding is the constellations are no longer in line with our astrological Sun sign "calendars," so that may be inaccurate and perhaps should be investigated and updated, much like other calendars were inaccurate historically and had to be updated. When you actually do the math and hand cast charts like I did in my youth, you calculate sidereal or star time for the time and place in question. This includes accounting for latitude and longitude of the place of birth.  So a brief history of man's relationship to time: Historically, it was noon when the Sun was directly overhead. If you had a local clock tower in your town -- because clockworks were huge...

From a high cliff, Papillon observes a cove where he realizes the waves are powerful enough to carry a man out to sea and to the nearby mainland. That's from the Wikipedia article for  Papillon , a 1973 film based on a true story. Papillon is French for butterfly and it's the nickname of the main character who has a large butterfly tattoo.  He's a safe cracker wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in a harsh prison system in French Guiana. At some point, he's transferred to a facility on an island.  Others have built rafts to try to escape and have all been washed back to the base of the cliffs by strong waves, breaking up their rafts and probably killing them. Papillon spends substantial time observing the waves and concludes there's a pattern. My recollection is he says there is a pattern of seven waves which repeats.  He believes if he leaves at the right time, he can get out. He does successfully escape. A reasonable use of astrology ...

The rising sign changes signs every TWO HOURS because there are 12 signs and 24 hours in the day. Being off by an hour means half the people will be told the wrong rising sign. And ALL people will be told the wrong degree which impacts aspects and transits. How much does it matter that we have a dozen house systems and fundamentally don't agree on house details if you are an engineer at NASA? I have absolutely no idea. I'm guessing the big information is stuff like "Planets that form a 90 degree angle to Earth at launch time or to the current path of travel of some space vehicle will create a high energy gulf stream, so to speak, which can potentially cause problems OR get used  to rapidly ride that wave to where you are going." Will NASA need to "correct" existing astrological lore about house systems to use this information? My two answers are No and Not Necessarily.  So I once had this  get rich quick scheme  where I was going to offer to do a quick and ...

If you work for a space agency or company and want to take my hypothesis seriously that astrological charts are geocentric maps of the solar system which can be used as Gravity Maps for improving navigation, you should get a sailor experienced with sailed vessels and a serious astrologer who knows the math to help you figure this out. The punchline   is it was a lat-long (latitude longitude) calculation and I knew he was wrong because I'm an astrologer. Calculating lat-long for WHERE someone was born or the event in question took place is part of every chart. I was getting my Certificate in GIS from UC-Riverside which shares staff with ESRI because ESRI is in the same gepgraphic area. They are essentially co-located, or close enough for ESRI staff to moonlight as UC-Riverside professors for the occasional class here and there.  ESRI is the world leader in GIS software, so I have world class GIS education and I was better than my classmates at understanding things like lat-lon...

If the movie Hidden Figures is at all historically accurate, they solved their unsolvable navigation issue with Euler's Method, which is called old math in the movie. Astrology is old math for mapping the gravitational ripples we need to understand for navigating between planets, like a sailing ship on the sea. An astrological chart is a geocentric map of the solar system full of notes about interactions between the gravitational wakes and eddies of other heavenly bodies as we experience those gravitational pressures on Earth. You just need to translate it to a space flight navigation tool.  It already has a rich history of observations of turbulence, dead zones, high pressure zones, harmonic confluence etc. Figuring out how to translate thousands of years of observations such as "When planets change direction, you are in for a bumpy few days." to space weather flight turbulence will give you access to a wealth of existing knowledge about gravitational sea waves, so to ...

Aspects are the angles in an astrological chart. It's a map of a point in time of a solar system where everything is in motion. Transits are current and future motion and show how those bodies are currently interacting with each other or how they relate to points in someone's natal chart.

Here are the most commonly cited aspects in astrology and the mathematical angle they represent: Opposition: 180 degrees apart Trine: 120 degrees apart Square: 90 degrees apart Sextile: 60 degrees apart Conjunction: 0 degrees apart Again, it's a geocentric map. A square is two heavenly bodies at a 90 degree angle as seen from earth.  I fundamentally do not  agree with classifications of "good" influences and "bad" influences in traditional astrology.  Traditionally, a square and an opposition are bad influences.  I find it more useful to think of them as high energy aspects. Charts with no  oppositions or squares are "losers" who go nowhere. Too many of them and you have a drama queen unlikely to get their act together.  Trines are traditionally seen as "good" aspects. It's more accurate to think of them as stable harmonics. Keep in mind you can bring a bridge down with harmonics of that sort. If it matches up the right way, the motion a...

Astrology : The irrational belief that the Sun, the Moon and other heavenly bodies influence life here on Earth via invisible forces. Like gravity. The three most important points in a natal chart are the sun, the moon and the rising sign. I've tried to explain this before but it's rambly.  The rising sign marks one of the two horizons and is part of the House system. The Rising sign and House system tell you Earth's mathematical relationship or orientation in a geocentric map of the solar system.  So the most important influences in an astrological chart are the sun, the moon and the earth. If you phrased it right, no one on earth would disagree that the sun, moon and earth are the biggest influences in the solar system on life on planet earth. The personal planets are generally those closest to earth: Mercury, Venus and Mars. Those have the strongest influence on individuals.  Then you have planets that rule relationships to the larger world, like higher education, law...

... it's a misnomer that it's "the study of the STARS," which is what the word means. Historically, planets visible to the naked eye without a telescope were called wandering stars. So it's more like the study of gravitational influences of different bodies within our solar system.  I've written about Retrogrades  previously. Astrology is a geocentric map. Earth is in the middle and the points of interest are mapped based on how they appear from earth. Retrograde means it is "moving backwards." It does "move backwards" in the astrological chart, going back to earlier mathematical points in the chart -- 9 degrees of this sign instead of 11 degrees, for example -- but no planet physically travels backwards. It is sort of an optical illusion based on its relationship to Earth in a geocentric map of important gravitational points within our solar system.  All sources agree that Retrograde planets influence us differently than planets moving Di...

I'm not readily finding a citation to back this up, but my understanding is that some physician had an astonishing track record of referring patients for testing for a specific STD (I think syphilis) before they were showing known symptoms. His patients were getting correctly identified as infected earlier than average.  Rather than decide he's magic, they put two other physicians in the room with him to observe him and try to figure out what he was picking up on though he couldn't tell you himself what that was.  And they eventually identified a new symptom that shows up early: An eye flutter. I've written multiple pieces here giving my opinion that astrology was a cover story for learned commoners trying to make a buck advising kings of old. So astrology did the opposite of the above story and doubled down on conning people and using "The stars say..." rather than "It's my opinion" and asking people "But WHY do you think that?" and th...

I grew up in Georgia where my primary exposure to pineapple was canned pineapple, plus the occasional "fresh" whole pineapple during the short window in the summer when that was available at some kind of reasonable price. (HA HA HA -- more like half rotted after traveling so far.) And I was NOT a fan. I was like "Who would WANT to eat this GARBAGE? WHY????" Then I moved to the West Coast at some point, had access to ACTUAL somewhat fresh pineapple for much of the year at some kind of reasonable price and for a time became a zealous convert to my new religion of eating fresh pineapple. (I assume if you go to Hawaii, where most of it is grown, and eat it there, you would go "WOW. Pineapples on the West Coast are AWFUL compared to this.") "Popular" astrology is kind of like canned pineapple. It's intended to give access to a wider audience but all it does is give it a bad reputation as the garbage that popular astrology really is. So ...

A while back, there was an HN Discussion of an article titled The code worked differently when the moon was full. The article itself is not really about the full moon impacting the code but some of the early comments talked about real world examples of that type thing, such as: Low tide impacting a thing. A biannual issue caused by the angle of the sun that one remark dubbed bughenge . And the observation: it's not astrology to suggest that the phase of the Moon could affect things on Earth seeing as how it's what causes tides. I enjoyed the discussion because I think there is something to astrology. I think it began as the types of observations noted above: That the phases of the moon have real world impact. Somewhere along the way, astrology seems to have left behind such practical observations that were apparently primitive efforts at weather prediction and turned into fortune telling of the sort found at carnivals. The plot for the movie Only You  hinges on a ...