Sea-deep beliefs, rigidly and soul-fully felt can now be released for a renewed future. Digital collage for Planet Waves by Jude Valentine.

To see more from contributing artist Jude Valentine, click here.

As Chiron, the Awakener, continues its journey through Aquarius (a sign associated with invention and innovation), we should expect to see more revelations of the consequences and limitations of our technologically dependent culture. Below are two events that illustrate one aspect of these limitations we’re now discovering: from near-orbit space to the depths of the sea, from satellites to submarines, we appear to be running out of optimal space to operate our machines.

In each incident technology failed to prevent what could have been two disasterous collisions. Chiron alerts us to problems that require our attention. Clearly, these events prove that over-crowding in our skies and seas is a reality that can no longer be ignored.

At a press conference Monday, Feb. 16, the British Navy admitted that the night of Feb. 4 two nuclear submarines — one British, one French — collided underwater.В 

While the British Ministry of Defence is downplaying the accident, calling it an “infinitesimal” coincidence that they’d been the same place at the same time,В the BBC isn’t buying the story: “[The claim] is undermined because NATO allies routinely share information at a top-secret level about the deployment of submarines to ensure they do not occupy the same area of ocean, an arrangement in which the French, whose nuclear deterrent remains independent, are understood to participate.”

The collision occurred, however, in a well-trafficked depth of the North Atlantic preferred by British, French, American, and even Russian nuclear submarines.

Satellites Collide: An Update

Following up on last week’s satellite smash-up — Russia’s Mission Control Chief, Vladimir Solovyov, thinks debris from the two destroyed satellites could hang around for 10,000 years. This is a problem because the debris in a well-trafficked zone for satellites: “800 kilometers is a very popular orbit which is used by Earth-tracking and communications satellites. The clouds of debris pose a serious danger to them.”

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Planet Waves Radio premiers tonight at 11 pm ET, 8 pm PT on Blog Talk Radio.

Dear Friend and Reader:

First in honor of tonight’s Pisces New Moon, here is the March monthly horoscope. Second, in honor of the Pisces New Moon, here is a one-day-only opportunity to sign up for Planet Waves for a price you pick. This is the perfect opportunity if you’ve never subscribed before. The link says “gift subscription” — use it for a gift to someone else, or consider it a gift to yourself and your community.

Photo by Sean Hayes.

Remember, it’s our subscribers who make this daily astrology (and much else) diary possible. If you’ve been coming here for a while and have felt tempted to sign up but have not, for some reason you don’t understand, really feel the fact that we are riding on the graces of others who want to enjoy our best work, and make it possible to share all of our work with the Internet community.

We have a bit of bad news from NASA today. Launch of the carbon-monitoring satellite this morning failed, and the thing landed in the ocean near Antarctica. I am not going to call a conspiracy yet, though I did not like the chart with a launch on a void of course Moon. However, I don’t think the human race wants to know how bad the carbon situationВ  is here on the planet. Meanwhile, these satellites are not cheap to design or build, and now it’s laying in a heap of wreckage. I don’t think we willВ  be seeing another one soon, unless my neighbors finish up the homemade one they are assembling in their garage.

Today Mercury is conjunct Jupiter. This is good for everyone. Besides being a brilliant moment — Jupiter in Aquarius, with Mercury coming along to meet it — it’s about new ideas, and holding a vision for the world. Dear readers, we talk about this a lot. But when you step off the Internet and outside your door, what do you do about it? Do you trust your own ideas? Do you think they are worth acting on?

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Editor’s Note:В The following article was written by Phil Sedgwick, an astrologer and long-time friend of Planet Waves. Sedgwick has done a lot of work with centaurs: comet-like bodies orbiting our Sun. Today, he wrote about Comet Lulin, which will be visible in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Phil explains what what to look for, and what it might signify, in the article below. To read more from Phil, or to subscribe to his Galactic Times, click here. –EFC

The comet is now faintly visible from a dark site. Lulin will pass closest to Earth -- 38 million miles, or about 160 times farther than the Moon -- late on the evening of Feb. 23 for North America. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL.

It cruised around our Sun quietly in January, gaining momentum and popularity as its visibility increased to naked eye proportions and now everyone wants to know the dets, at least that’s what the e-mail requests I’ve received indicate. What the hell is a Comet Lulin and, other than a great chance to observe cool stuff in the night sky, should I care? Actually, yes.

Comet Lulin was “discovered” on July 11, 2007. This comet possesses an extreme eccentricity: 0.999986, which means it has an orbit that is nearly parabolic and we get one look at this comet in a hugely long time. Tomorrow, Feb. 24, after nearing the Sun on Jan. 14, the comet comes as close to the Earth as it does, outbound. The result of this is the best viewing. It’s easy to find. The comet is near Saturn, whose moons are putting on quite the show for telescope viewers. The simplest star map is available on www.spaceweather.com. When you look near Saturn you’ll see the comet, looking a little fuzzy on the edges and its green color may not be evident to the naked eye. I saw it the other evening from the yard just as it was entering Virgo nearly equidistant between Arcturus and Saturn. Of course, Tucson lacks street lights in most neighborhoods because of our proximity to Kitt Peak. You might have to get out of town for better viewing.

Tomorrow, Comet Lulin and Saturn virtually hold hands in the sky. This places them conjunct in the sign of Virgo. Now the full import of a comet can be determined by checking the degrees of its node and perihelion. While I’ve found differing date/times for the exact perihelion, suffice it to say that the comet reached closest proximity to the Sun as we observed the Sun in mid-Capricorn. The node degree (heliocentric) is 8 Pisces 32. The comet bears a Capricorn-Pisces mindset and as it nears us it flavors its influence with a strong shot of Saturn, Capricorn’s ruler. So let’s see, we have reality vs. fantasy and hard-core life vs. inspired spirit as the comet’s prevailing themes? Yes.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Federal laws are being proposed today toВ stem the tide of EWS (Emailing While Sleeping), a disturbing, dangerousВ andВ growing type of somnambulism affecting millions of computer-addicted adults across the country. This new form makes sleepers in deep REM stateВ get up out of bed, turn on their computers, log on to their email accounts and send out everything from party invitations to love notes to hate mail.

Sleep experts and legislative analysts from Smeer-Lactosis & Grim (SL&G), a Washington DC-based, K-Street lobbying firm had this to say:

“We’ve heard anecdotal evidenceВ from large numbers of people emailing out invitations to do everything from sorting hell holes out with dinner and drinks, wine and caviar only, toВ a ‘come toВ a naked in front of all your relatives party, Freud and Jung-optional attire’. Needless to say, this has wrecked havoc on the 18-34 year-oldВ demographic population, which sees any variety of reason to hold an all-night party orВ rave as a serious invitation, particularly if its done on Evite. This leads to mass confusion, fear, hysteria and ultimately, screws with your Blackberry calendar function.”

TheВ SL&G advisor continued, “The ramifications of not doing anything could be severe”.

To attack the growing epidemic, SL&GВ is workingВ with members of CongressВ onВ an anti-sleepwalking stimulus bill on its way through committee right now. “We need to attachВ an EWSВ clause to any new highway or virtual superhighway legislationВ in congress from here on out. Everyone is sleeping through life. We hope this will wake them up.”

“After all,” theВ SL&G adviser concluded, “you can never tell whether an email party В invitation isВ legitimate. SPAM filters do not yet have the capability to recognize and filter out an e-mail sent by someoneВ in theВ REM state.”

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On Mardi Gras, and a few hours before tomorrow’s New Moon, NASA will launch its Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) into space. The launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is scheduled for 1:51:30 am PST.

OCO is the first spacecraft dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide, the most significant human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change. File the results under “too much information.” Image courtesy of NASA.

The Carbon Observatory is a satellite, and it’s NASA’s first that is dedicated solely to measuring the carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere. It will monitor increases and decreases, and will try to determine where carbon dioxide in the atmosphere originated.

In the chart for the scheduled launch — it could change depending on technical factors and the weather — the Great Attractor in Sagittarius is rising. As scheduled now, this mission will have far-reaching effects, beyond what we can comprehend now. Pholus is also close to the ascendant; this is the planet that lets the Pepsi out of the shaken-up bottle on a hot day (as we’ve often described it here). This might come back to us not as corn syrup in the face, but as too much information.

The ascendant ruler (Jupiter) and the descendent ruler (Mercury) are conjunct exact to eight arc minutes — a symbol of innovation, and a suggestion that the mission will work very well; but we are not going to like the news. It’s too bad we didn’t have this kind of technology before we dumped all that carbon into the atmosphere. Mars is conjunct Nessus, which is likely to represent how badly we have screwed ourselves over.

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Sitting outside the Point EphГ©mГЁre cafe, concert hall and cultural gathering place in ParisВґs 19th arrondissement. Being along the canal and offering cheap drinks and art, you canВґt go wrong. Photo by Danielle Voirin.

To see more from contributing photographer Danielle Voirin, click here.

And I thought it was about a dog who won the lottery…

Today Mercury is conjunct Jupiter in Aquarius. There have been several of these the past few months. Conjunctions in Aquarius are going off like popcorn these days, in particular the Moon making its way across Chiron and Neptune today, Mars exactly conjunct centaur Nessus. So not only do we have a lot of Aquarius, we have a lot of centaur action, and that feels edgy.

Photo by Sean Hayes.

It’s edgy in the sense of walking the line between pleasure and pain, between cause and effect, between a sense of injury and the power that such offers when we take it consciously. If you ask me this is the principal task of living, of enlightenment now. It’s simply about awareness. Maybe it’s always been that way, since with our free will, most humans are content to walk around in a haze, unaware of the pain we might be causing to others, unaware of what hurts us though we really are not and typically spacing out on acknowledging the choices we are making even as we make them.

Aquarius is a reference to our social choreography; the largely unconscious way we treat, speak to and think of one another, the expectations we have, and the rules we supposedly play by. And I do mean the rules of dating and supposed friendship; the patterns whereby individual will is subjugated to a group, and where individuals feel they can’t let go of their precious individuality sufficient to actually participate in the shared life of society.

There are many such rules, and most of us want to rebel but either lack the strength or the willingness to go it alone if we need to; if we find we cannot play along. As a result, we are subjected to a system of power that we in fact create and that we in fact could change, but instead we tend to be its victims. Moon to Chiron is resonance with the emotional pain of that reality; Mercury conjunct Jupiter suggests strongly that there is a way out, and a way into something much better, if we are willing to consider a new idea.

The Moon is heading for the Pisces Sun, and we will experience a New Moon Tuesday night at 8:35 pm ET. So we are in the dark of the Moon for a while. The Moon, conjunct two outer planets today, might be taking us some deep places and to call the astrology visionary would be an understatement; but it’s only helpful if your eyes are open.