Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

Equinox, Eclipse and all that stuff 

It's officially Spring again!

Despite serious neglect, apart from by the weather itself, the bulbs in our window boxes have come up and bloomed again. Alice feels they have forgiven her for not carefully storing them in the dark and replacing with summer flowers last year.

Now who's being a bit silly? She was the one in the dark cupboard, as it were,
and she's blooming again now. There, there. . .

It's the Equinox today. Equal day and night. We wrote at length about that two years ago, both from an Astronomical and an Astrological point of view. Have a look here. Alice has carefully checked every link in that post, and they still work.

Brian Cox and Dara O'Briain

All you astrology-sceptics, take note. Especially if your name is Dara O'Briain. He, and the oh-so-charming Brian Cox have been dissing the ancient art for years, despite petitions to the BBC. They did it again last night, in the post-eclipse Stargazing Live programme on BBC2.

Alice, who is an afficionado of both sciences is particularly peeved by their ignorance of what astrology does and does not claim.

Scientists like Cox have a tedious habit of criticising astrologers for beliefs they do not actually hold. Such as the old carp saying there should be 13 Signs of the Zodiac, the additional one being Ophiuchus, because there are 13 constellations along the ecliptic. See the detailed reply to this gross misunderstanding by astrologer Deborah Houlding.

Ophiuchus, from Urania's Mirror c. 1825

A Zodiacal sign is essentially defined as a 12-fold mathematical division of the ecliptic circle . . . the tropical zodiac signs now only retain a symbolic memory of the constellations they were close to at the time of their creation. Traditionally, both astronomers and astrologers understood that the zodiac is a mathematical and idealised division of the Sun's ecliptic circle, whose exact proportions cannot be precisely divided by the visual groupings of the background stars.

Shame in a way, Ophiuchus looks pretty amazing I think, holding up the serpent.

Astrology is a science, in terms of the precise data required and calculations involved (now mostly done by computer) but it is an art indeed in how the complex results are then interpreted.

Try it out for yourself at astro.com but note you'll need your time and place of birth, as well as the date. More than just your so called "star sign" indeed.

If you wonder how all this can be turned by a computer into an intelligible reading, see this article about the AI expert system based on Liz Greene's interpretations.

Moreover, serious astrologers (most of whom don't write those brief paragraphs in the newspapers) do not believe that the position of the planets, relative to degrees of the ecliptic (not to the actual constellations, which move with the precession of the equinoxes) has an effect on human beings! Rather they say there are thousands of years of observed correlations between these two.

To show details, click for larger size

Alice was grunting, huffing and puffing an awful lot here, so I felt obliged to let her put in some bold and underlinings etc. She ended up with so many, though, it was aesthetically most unpleasing, and we had to take a few of them out again. We'll just have to trust the intelligence of our readers.

Whilst Googling away for references, we came upon this interactive animation demonstrating the ecliptic and the seasons. It's not essential to our argument, but great fun to play with!
The screenshot above shows the setup at our own Latitude, today. But you can alter it in various ways and set the animation going.

Oh dear . . .

What about the eclipse? We're coming to that. Unfortunately we weren't able to get any of those special protective glasses for viewing the sun - everywhere online was sold out or outrageously expensive.

The Daily Record advertised (in the Metro) that there would be a free pair with Thursday's issue. In fact one could only claim them at Morrison's, and not just a local one either. The nice young man in our nearest branch told us we had better phone the big supermarket first, as stocks were very low. We gave up.

What a con! No links for them.

The eclipse through our window and cloud!

So we saw most of it on TV, apart from the image to the right which is our only direct observation.

Not very impressive on here, but it was exciting at the time.

Sorry, Alice has no idea why there seems to be a double crescent sun.

We'll add below some of our favourite eclipse photos from the internet.

The one to the left is from the European Space Agency's Proba-2 satellite. So not what anyone on earth would actually see.

But, goodness me, it is pretty, isn't it?

Don't forget to click on the images to see a larger version.

This photo was taken near Stonehenge by Christopher Ison and is wonderfully atmospheric.

A lot of people made a trip to the Faroe Islands (half way between Scotland and Iceland) where the eclipse was going to be complete.

Cloudy skies masked the sun itself for most of these visitors, although the sudden transition to total darkness was pretty impressive. See that as shown on the BBC. There are more photos and video there, too.

Nevertheless, some spectators apparently demanded their money back from the tour operators!!

People frequently mystify me.

A good friend of ours clearly took a much better option, and texted that she had seen a wonderful total eclipse, at sea, 100 miles north of Faroe Islands! We're green with envy. But why "green"? I asked. Try these explanations on WiseGeek.

Toby Melville took this from near Bridgwater, in south western England. Beautifully artistic.

Our favourite "find" of the day however was a video of Hamferð, a doom-metal band (what?!) playing Deyðir Varðar live during the eclipse above the village of Kvívík in The Faroe Islands.

Still from the video on YouTube. Do go watch it, it's fabulous. Hurrah for YouTube!

The track is from their album Evst [go to SHOW MORE] about the journey of a man searching for his son who went missing in the mountains, during a storm. This song is about him realising the son is gone, then desperately looking for him. We found it quite ethereal and haunting.