Galactic Journey: Sun in Sagittarius

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Just before 11 pm EST on Nov. 21, the Sun entered the sign Sagittarius. While on one level all the signs are equal, Sagittarius is an unusual energy from the standpoint of the world of work-a-day, entertainment and gossip. Sagittarius is the direction of the core of our galaxy, which influences everything about this sign.

The Milky Way appears as a streak across the summer sky. Photo by Mila Zinkova, Wikimedia Commons.
The Milky Way appears as a streak across the summer sky. Photo by Mila Zinkova, Wikimedia Commons.

The Milky Way, our home in space, is a spiral arrangement of some 300 billion stars, a miniature universe of its own. Even with our culture’s relatively advanced knowledge of astronomy, the galaxy is an elusive concept to most people.

It’s still a stretch for many to grasp the spatial relationship involved in how the Earth goes around the Sun — even though we can see both. The galaxy is nearly invisible, appearing in the Northern Hemisphere only in summer, and as a misty, slightly glowing cloud.

Yet at its core is a supermassive black hole, which binds together our island in space. So while on the one hand awareness of our galaxy eludes perception by the senses, it also contains the heaviest, strangest thing anywhere in proximity to our solar system.

I would say the largest, but black holes don’t seem to take up much physical three-dimensional space. They seem more like a door into another dimension — a door that is gradually becoming something real.

With these ideas, we’ve gone beyond what ordinary astrology was designed to handle, and we’ve also gone beyond what most people can actually feel. Though these concepts have been percolating in science fiction for a while, they seem to have little influence on our lives.

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