Planets surprisingly far from MC in mundo

[Mike V]

Hi y'all,

I cooked up my upcoming SLR on 12/29 in Solar Fire (Hackensack, NJ), and one look at the ecliptical view was kind of scary - Saturn and Pluto both look about 4*-5* from MC, on opposite sides. Of course, I looked at the mundoscope, and was shocked to discover that they're both just about 10* away - in opposite directions.

So what gives? I thought that Saturn was one of the planets you could "trust" more than others in the ecliptical view (and Pluto has very small latitude off the ecliptic right now).

Curious; would love to know if anyone has an explanation. This is the first time I've seen Saturn be so much further away from an angle than it looked ecliptically. Pluto is also a surprise given its latitude.

[Jim Eshelman]

Great question!

First, I'm confirming your calculations. Saturn is 9°41' past MC, Pluto is 11°00' before it. The real angular planets are the Moon and Uranus opposed across the horizon.

You are right about expecting little distortion because of low celestial latitude. The best place to see this is when the planet is exactly on MC: Transiting Saturn at 16°06' Sagittarius is on MC when that angle is 26°04' Sagittarius - hardly any difference at all. Transiting Pluto at 25°31' Sag culminates when 25°32' Sag is on MC - again almost no difference at all.

The issue is the angle at which the ecliptic is cutting across local space in that part of the zodiac (near the solstice point at 5°00' Sagittarius); that is, the angle between the ecliptic and the prime vertical in that part of space. The easy way to see this is to look at the width of the 9th and 10th houses. Think about it: Nothing has less latitude than the ecliptic itself, and yet with MC 20°27' Sagittarius, the 11th cusp is 5°54' Capricorn yet we know that the 11th cusp (having no latitude!) is, by definition, exactly 30°00' from MC. Only 15°27' of the ecliptic stretch across 30° of the prime vertical, so Pluto (not otherwise distorted by latitude) is 5° of longitude from MC which is worth about 10° along the PV - half the house.

Similarly, with 9th cusp 6°40' Sagittarius, the 9th house has only about 14° of longitude so, again, it's "2 for 1" time - Saturn, about 4° from MC in longitude is closer to 8° on PV. (It's really more like 9-10°, but close enough.)

Instead of thinking of the foreground zone as 10° either side of horizon or meridian, think of it as a third of a Campanus house. (Same thing, actually.) You get the opposite effect with the setting Moon: The 6th house is 60° wide along the zodiac though only 30° wide along the prime vertical. It looks like Mon is 16° below Dsc, so you can guess it's closer to 8°. (In this case, Moon has 5° of latitude so there is a further distortion, and she's really only about 3° below.

[Mike V]

OH, I get it! Thank you!

Wow, I've never thought about this type of "house stretching" before, despite seeing it and sort of grasping what was happening.
I forgot to mention Moon as well; that surprised me too, but I'm used to the Moon playing tricks on me with variable latitude, whereas I had no idea what had gotten into Saturn!

I do have one question for you though -

The best place to see this is when the planet is exactly on MC: Transiting Saturn at 16°06' Sagittarius is on MC when that angle is 26°04' Sagittarius - hardly any difference at all.

This is a typo, right? Otherwise I am confused when I thought I was un-confused.

[Jim Eshelman]

Yeah, typo . That's supposed to be 16, not 26.