Today’s Oracle takes us to the Taurus weekly of July 18, 2003

Get prepared to take control of your home. You’re going to do it with light. Imagine that you unscrew all the closet doors in your house and put them out in the shed (if you live in the city, under the bed). Then get some of those clamp lights at the hardware store and make the whole scene into a movie set. Take a few pictures for the record. Take down all the window drapes and blinds wash them — invite the cousins to help out, buy pizza. Then start throwing things out (or recycling them at Goodwill). Save a few artifacts, in envelopes or a special box dedicated to the purpose.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

By Evaggelos Vallianatos, Truthout.org; sent in by Carol

Just before Easter 1900, Greek sponge-fishers were on their way to the waters of Tunisia when a violent storm threw their boats to Antikythera, a tiny island located north of Crete in the Aegean.

After the storm, the sponge-fishers explored the waters of Antikythera for sponges. One of the divers, Elias Stadiatis, discovered the remnants of an ancient ship full of statues – horses, men, women and vases.

Of several treasures, the most precious was a very small piece of metal with gears, which the archaeologists of the National Museum in Athens originally dubbed astrolabe, which in Greek means, “star catcher.” Astrolabes helped figure out the position of the sun and the stars in the sky. Astrolabes were not complicated devices. However, the machine of Antikythera was complex and, eventually, Greek archaeologists renamed it the Antikythera Mechanism and dated it from 150 to 100 BCE.

The shipwreck probably happened in the middle of the first century BCE. The doomed Roman ship was sailing from Rhodes to Rome. It carried looted Greek treasure: more than 100 bronze and marble statues, amphorae and coins.

One statue, the Antikythera Youth, is a bronze masterpiece of a naked young man from the fourth century BCE.

Museum officials left the fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism alone until one of them, the archaeologist Spyridon Stais, saw an inscription in ancient Greek on one of the dials. Others noticed perfectly cut triangular gear teeth. It was May 1902.

In 1905, Konstantinos Rados, a naval historian, said the Antikythera device was too complex to be an astrolabe.

In 1907, the German philologist Albert Rehm sided with Rados. Rehm correctly suggested the Antikythera clockwork resembled the Sphere of Archimedes that Cicero saw and described in the first century BCE.

Archimedes, a mathematical genius and engineer of the third century BCE, was the greatest scientist who ever lived. He is the father of mathematical physics and mechanics that made the Antikythera computer possible.

Cicero said the planetarium of Archimedes reproduced the movements of the sun and the moon, including those of the planets one could follow with the naked eye: Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. The moon, Cicero said, “was always as many revolutions behind the sun on the bronze contrivance as would agree with the number of days it was behind it in the sky. Thus, the same eclipse of the sun happened on the globe as would actually happen [in the sky].”

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Illustration Credit: Jason Rowe, Kepler Mission

“Using the prolific planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, astronomers have discovered 1,235 candidate planets orbiting other suns since the Kepler mission’s search for Earth-like worlds began in 2009. To find them, Kepler monitors a rich star field to identify planetary transits by the slight dimming of starlight caused by a planet crossing the face of its parent star. In this remarkable illustration, all of Kepler’s planet candidates are shown in transit with their parent stars ordered by size from top left to bottom right. Simulated stellar disks and the silhouettes of transiting planets are all shown at the same relative scale, with saturated star colors. Of course, some stars show more than one planet in transit, but you may have to examine the picture at high resolution to spot them all. For reference, the Sun is shown at the same scale, by itself below the top row on the right. In silhouette against the Sun’s disk, both Jupiter and Earth are in transit.” – NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

Whoever finds the most wins a hollow chocolate supernova. – amanda

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Pisces weekly of May 30, 2008

What were your father’s messages to you? Don’t just consider the things he told you or the things you overheard; consider the implications of his actions. Consider how he treated people and most of all, consider how you, as a deeply sensitive and emotional person, responded to his existence. Take this back as far into your childhood as you can go. You are in a particularly excellent zone for decoding the mixed signals that he gave you. When decoding a mixed signal, you have to take one side of the equation, then the other, then figure out what they mean together. Most mortals stop the process right before the third step. Make sure you get there; it’s the hardest part of the process, but that’s where the payoff is.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Sample of the Minor Planet Catalog, which shows names of Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Makemake, all of them dwarf planets beyond the orbit of Neptune. Also listed are many of their cousins that were entered around the same time. The number in (parens) is the MPC catalog number. Once a body has had its orbit confirmed by repeat observations, it's ready for a number, which is added to its provisional designation. Once a body has a number, it's eligible for a naming (that is a somewhat complex matter; different kinds of bodies follow different naming guidelines). Note that Pluto has its place in the MPC catalog just like all the other minor planets, including many that have numbers but have not yet been named. Back in the late 1990s, scientists were reserving number 10,000 for Pluto, anticipating that it might be made into a minor planet, but that idea was somehow bypassed. It is now (134340) Pluto.

Dear Friend and Reader:

I’ve mentioned a few times that I was giving a presentation at Omega Institute last night. That actually happened; I spoke to a full room of Omega staff, presenting on the topic of 2012 astrology. To do this, I started with an introduction to astrology and in particular, to what is different about modern astrology.

The first issue I took up is what it means to be doing astrology in our historical phase of discovery — of new planets constantly being plucked out of the heavens. We’ve gone from knowing about 2,060 minor planets orbiting our Sun at the time of Chiron’s discovery in 1977, to knowing about something like 500,000 of them today. The chart you see above is a little snip from the Minor Planet Catalog (MPC) that’s kept by some devoted scientists at Harvard University. The bit you have there is from when the first dwarf planets were given their places — Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Makemake (Ceres is way at the beginning of the catalog, as minor planet 1).

We then look at the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1965-66, and the corresponding Uranus-Pluto square of 2012-2015 (which has its first exact contact in June 2012). And I talk about the Venus transit of the Sun of June 2012. So the discussion leads up to the astronomical events of June 2012.

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By Judith Gayle

Earth Day came and went this year, and while there seems to be a renewed current of interest in all things green, the emergencies of the day kept the political waters running too fast to notice many ripples. Climate change remains the Elephant in the room, ignored by the small-e elephants as a truly inconvenient truth. I am encouraged that Obama continues to be an enthusiastic proponent of alternative energies as well as a harsh critic of climate deniers and here, FDR-like, he challenged the grassroots to make it impossible for him to resist their collective voice.

This week brought us potent reminders of the Gulf oil disaster, a review of all that went wrong in anniversary pictures of destroyed wetlands and wildlife. Hard to believe a year has come and gone: long enough for the lobbyists to get an ambitious drilling program back on track and for BP, which is taking a 10 billion dollar tax credit on its clean-up losses, to sue Transocean, owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, for $40 billion in damages. It should be noted that, to date, British Petroleum has paid out a mere $3.6 million in claims from its 20-billion-dollar compensation fund. We have to wonder, ultimately, if BP will pay any fiscal price at all for devastating our oceans. You’re not surprised are you?

You can’t possibly be surprised that a gigantic corporation with coffers Midas would envy is as slippery as a snake and just as mean. We’ve seen too many examples of this behavior over the last few decades to think corporate America is our friend. Now that the Supremes have given them personhood, it’s ridiculous to think of enormous corporations as anything other than serial killers, state sanctioned and at-large. Pay no attention to your television screen, my discerning friend: the entertaining, cutesy commercials for insurance, the touchy-feely two-bathtubs-in-a-field that Big Pharma favors, or banking services offered by your by-golly corporate BFF. It’s all hype and snake oil, no matter how appealing we find those who hawk it for a living.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Aquarius weekly of Nov. 6, 2009

Neptune and Chiron have resumed direct motion in your sign. A few weeks ago, Jupiter resumed direct motion. If you recall, there was a triple conjunction of these planets earlier in the year. Now it’s about to repeat — only as three separate events. Let’s focus on the next one up: Jupiter conjunct Chiron. This relatively rare conjunction will enable you to focus your power of perception like you never have before. It’s truly a gem of astrology, which will grant you the gift of seeing what you have in common with the world; and to witness the validity of your own idealism. Yet there is something your psyche is trying to master, as a prerequisite, which is the ability to allow, without judgment. This allowing we could call truly objective knowledge. Once you get there, there’s another step to take. And what you know now is radically different than anything you’ve known in the past. What you are called upon to do will likewise be different.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Pale Blue Dot – Animation from Ehdubya on Vimeo.

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We Have Met the Enemy

Earth Day is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s natural environment. Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. While this first Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations. Earth Day is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and is celebrated in more than 175 countries every year. Numerous communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues. In 2009, the United Nations designated April 22 International Mother Earth Day. — Wikipedia page on Earth Day