#contellations

Meet the Real Zodiac

Today, in a first for ZeSpaceBlog, I am going to tell you your star signs and what it means for you.

No matter what star sign you were "born under", your day will be full of stuff, things will happen, and nobody else born under the same sign (or any other) will have exactly the same kind of day to you."

Now, that's that out of the way, lets dig a little deeper. Constellations are man made things, they tell ancient stories and play dot to dot often requiring a huge leap to see the object/s represented.

This is a fish ! You knew that of course, the second you looked at it.

In reality a constellation is the imagination of our ancestors, but that's cool, we can use it to make the sky interesting and recognizable (kind of), most of us would instantly recognize Orion or Ursa Major or the Southern Cross (depending on where you live), and in modern astronomy we can use they constellations and their boundaries to name stuff, to locate stuff, just like countries on a map, it can give an address using latitude and longitude (or 24 hours).

But there's a lot of constellations and only 12 in the above Zodiac, why ? Put simply, it's the constellations the Sun moves through.

So you'll recognize Libra, Virgo, Leo, Cancer, but who was born under Leo Minor ? Orion ? Ursa Major ? and what does "Born under" even mean ? surely all constellations are there when you're born ?

The answer is, given your birthdate, what constellation was the sun in front of. Why this has any baring on anything is anybody's guess.

Now, there's a few issues here, firstly there are 12 signs of the zodiac, and the sun passes through 13.

Poor old Ophiuchus, there's 51 Ophiuchi, cutting through the line and yet none of you are born under this, even if the Sun is in it.

And that leads to the next interesting point, the Zodiac is a split of equal 12 parts, across the 12 months of the calendar, but as you can see with Ophiuchus, not every constellation is cut across with the same distance, they all vary in size.

So using this, let's make a far more realistic Zodiac, we'll convert the 24hrs into 360 degree's representing the 365 days in a year, and starting part way through Pisces (Mar 21) at 0'.

Pisces - 8th March to 17 April

Aries - 18 April to 11 May

Taurus - 12 May to 20 June

Gemini - 21 June to 3 August

Cancer - 4 August to 8 August

Leo - 9 August to 16 September

Virgo - 17 September to 29 October

Libra - 30 October to 21 November

Scorpius - 22 November to 27 November

Ophiuchus - 28 November to 16 December

Sagittarius - 17 December to 18 January

Capricornus - 19 January to 14 February

Aquarius - 15 February to 7th March

Turning the leading image in this blog, into this !

But the positions of our star and small balls of dust and gas that orbit it, compared to the infinity of space moving behind it, have no baring on your life here, until a supernova occurs close by, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy burps in our direction or over time, stars get too close for comfort and start throwing rocks at us.

The magician . * ･ ｡ﾟ☆

Peter Apian (aka Petrus Apianus) was a prominent 16th century mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer. This is the 1st half of one of his star charts, printed in 1540. He added some unorthodox figures, such as a pack of three dogs to the right of Ursa Major, but made up for it by rigging it to revolve in order to show how the sky would look at any date between 7,000 BCE to 7,000 CE.

This was managed through 21 volvelles, which are a layered series of intricately produced paper discs which can be freely spun.

here are the designs of cancer leo and aries 

I thought of if all the zodiac signs were in an art school these would be the drama kids. well, kids in the dramatic arts. 

cancer: surfer dad from Hawaii parents from the Philippines 

leo: stupid cowboy from Texas also is an attention wore