I’ve had some of you email me lately about the latest 13th sign kerfuffle. Honestly, I wish the astronomers would stick to their side of the cosmos and leave us astrologers alone. Ever since the Age of Enlightenment, they have tried (and did succeed for a while) to call us crazy charlatans and sweep astrology under the rug. But that’s a post for another day.
Every so often the Ophiuchus question cycles through the social media channels. It might have NASA tagged to it, as if they’ve made some recent discovery that changes everything. But um no, that’s not true. The planets and Earth, orbit the Sun on pretty much on the same plane as they have since the beginning of time. From the Earth, it looks like the Sun moves around us once per year. The path it takes across the sky is the same year after year and we call this the ecliptic. The planets all move across the sky in that same path, too. So, like clockwork, the Sun passes into the same constellations at a certain time every year. You know the names of these constellations: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, etc.
The real question here is which zodiac you are using, though it’s much less sensational for those trying to debunk astrology. Western horoscopes use the Tropical Zodiac; Vedic horoscopes use the Sidereal Zodiac. What’s the difference? Right now, about 26 degrees as tropical starts Aries on March 21 and sidereal on April 15. This is because the Tropical system does not account for the precession of the equinox (cyclic wobbling of Earth’s axis as it rotates) and Sidereal does.
Both zodiacs divide the path of the sun around the earth into 12 pieces of pie, each named for a constellation, but the Tropical begins the Zodiac with the Vernal equinox and the sidereal with the constellation of Aries. Back in Hellenistic times, the two were one and the same, but because of the precession, they have been drifting apart at the rate of about 1.4 degrees every century.
What does this mean to you and your star sign? Nothing!
Your sign is correct for Western astrology. If you have your Vedic chart done, it might give you different signs, which are interpreted differently as well.
So relax, you are still your same Sun Sign and NASA should mind its own business.