So I'm supposedly a Capricorn now instead of an Aquarius?

[kane_magus]

Nah, I think I'ma stick with Aquarius. Oh wait, never mind, it apparently only applies to people born since 2009 anyway. (EDIT) ...or maybe that's wrong and the signs have been off for thousands of years now, I dunno. (/EDIT) Either way, I'ma stick with Aquarius regardless. *shrug*

Anyway, why is this supposedly such a big deal right now*, given that it's incredibly old news (at least in Internet time and three years is a looooong time in Internet time), and that's probably not even the first time this has been brought up before either. Sure, today's the first time I have heard of this myself as well, but a cursory 30 second search on Google found that other link. In any case, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

* - By which I mean nothing more than that it's currently trending on Twitter, which doesn't mean a whole lot given that Twitter had to implement special measures just to stop Justin Bieber from constantly trending.

Comments

[tokoz.livejournal.com]

Ehh, astrology cares about the location of various celestial bodies when you were born, yes, but it it imposes on those bodies a set diagram. That diagram may have its origins in actual constellations, but there's not so much relation any more, I think. The 12 houses don't line up like constellations at all.

I think this is just somebody being silly. ;)

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Looks like you're right about it being a joke, at least according to this (http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/2011/01/13/your-zodiac-sign-is-not-wrong/).

Assuming the whole article isn't pure bunk, it has told me more than I could ever need or want to know about astrology. And given that I think the whole thing's mostly a lot of hooey to begin with, aside from as a slightly interesting triviality, that's quite a lot. (I didn't even know there were multiple zodiac systems in use, for instance.) The only real problem I had with the article was the "If Kunkle doesn’t know this, it's like a race car driver not understanding the concept of a tire." line. Well, astronomer =/= astrologer, so it's very possible the guy indeed doesn't know about sidereal vs tropical astrology or whatever. In any case, whether that Kunkle guy was joking or just ignorantly talking out of his ass or what, I don't know, but apparently the Ophiuchus thing is a hoax that long pre-dates his recent announcement.

"As for Ophiuchus. This is an old hoax. Historically, Ophiuchus has never been listed as a constellation in the sidereal zodiac. It is a constellation out there, but it's off the ecliptic (that is, it's not along the path of the Sun through the sky). I've read that Ptolemy mentions it in his literature as an off-zodiac constellation, meaning that the Sun never travels through it. In any event, there are some two dozen constellations that touch the ecliptic; but the sidereal zodiac uses just 12 of them.

The origin of the hoax is a sci-fi author named John Sladek — a satire writer who died in 2000. Sladek liked to prank astrology, and he has a whole novel about a fictitious 13th sign based on Ophiuchus he called Arachne that was 'suppressed by the scientific community.' The Ophiuchus hoax first made its rounds in the late 1990s and pops up again like those emails from the guy in Nigeria who wants you to send him your bank account number so he can transfer $15 million your way."