Solunars by Aldebaran Sidereal Academy

Within the Novien, planets move nine times as fast as they do in the ecliptic. This means, for example, that in one day Novien Sun moves 9° and Moon moves more than 90°, and often as much as 120°, through the zodiac. Even more than that, all the planets moving rapidly means that numerous aspects form and separate in the course of a day (even if we don't count Moon).

This has been unwieldly - nearly impossible - to track to date. However, I've suggested that when Mike adds Noviens to the forthcoming 0.5.x version of TMSA he retain the Speed column correctly showing the Novien planet instantaneous speed (simply 9x the planets speed in the zodiac).

With this, we may have an important new tool in rectification for narrowing a general range of the day. For now, at least, I'm not going to ask Mike for one more tool which would be a rectification assist based on the Novien, a plotting of all exact hard aspects formed in the Novien over the course of a day, including those to natal planets. (Too little known to justify the labor at this point.) Nonetheless, I want to raise the general idea to get it in people's mind and perhaps allowing some preliminary conclusions on whether this is useful.

Here are Novien positions for my birth date, first at 0:00 and then at 24:00 to show how they moved in 24 hours.

Moo 13°25' Vir to 26° 49' Cap
Sun 20°36' Sco to 29°29' Sco
Mer 4°58' Can to 11°30' Can
Ven 16°08' Sco to 20°31' Sco
Mar 19°20' Ari to 24°51' Ari
Jup 2°20' Sag to 3°20' Sag
Sat 14°19' Gem to 15°20' Gem
Ura 29°58' Sco to 0°09' Sag
Nep 12°00' Aqu to 12°20' Aqu
Plu 18°53' Leo to 19°05' Leo

I can make patterns clearer by sorting each list in 90° sort order:

Ignoring Moon for the moment, and focusing on the faster planets, scanning down this list we can see that the day began with Venus square Pluto (as in my natal) and moving toward a conjunction with Sun. Sun was closely square Pluto. - By the end of the day, Venus-Pluto was even closer (which doesn't matter, considering the natus). Sun had moved forward to conjoin Uranus closely (in range of Jupiter). Sun's aspects are surely the most important.

Now, this difference isn't as big as it might be in other cases (but I thought it best to use my own chart). The only big non-lunar change is Sun moves from square Pluto to conjunct Uranus. People who know me only a little (and some who know me much better) might easily mistake one for the other. For example, I can see how people could mistake me for a Sun-Uranus aspect (and I have a Sun-Uranus paran where I've lived for 45+ years). So, if my birth time weren't known, using this might cause people to think I was more likely born closer to the end of the day than the beginning - and this would be wrong.

Another approach - something which distinguishes the Novien from the Navamsa - is to see how these planets move across my natal planets:

• Novien Mercury, which moves 6.5° on my birth date, is in close conjunction with natal Jupiter-Uranus early in the day and loses that Class 1 conjunction by around 5:30 AM.
• Novien Mars, which moves 5.5°, is in close opposition to my Mercury at the start and leaves Class 1 before 9 AM.
• Novien Sun squares my Moon more in the late part of the day, not entering Class 1 orb until after 10 AM.

Even my public record suggests that Mercury to Jupiter-Uranus and Mars to Mercury fit me better than Sun to Moon. These suggest I was born in the early part of the day, probably before sunrise, rather than late in the day.

This all remains speculative, of course, but it might be useful when there isn't a single clue to a birth time and we feel we need to push toward one somehow.

Based on the foregoing, we might conclude that my birth time needs to be before Mercury leaves Class 1 orb of conjunct natal Uranus. This means Novien Mercury no later than 6°20' Cancer, which is almost exactly 5 AM (on more careful calculation than above). We can redo the table above to see how this narrows things like Moon.
If I cared about Novien Moon-signs (which I don't), we've narrowed it to two. I'm ignoring that. The point of focus is what aspects Moon might make internal to the Novien and, perhaps, to natal planets.

Within the Novien, Moon begins with a close square to Saturn, which is not fitting. (By that, I mean: Almost anything can be argued as fitting, but on first impression that aspect would be wrong.) Therefore, birth was probably not in the first hour after midnight. Moving on, Moon's only other aspect will be a square to Novien Mercury, which sounds quite right! (We might doubt it only because my Virgo Sun almost makes it redundant.)

With regard to the natal, many complex things are possible, with Moon crossing natal Sun and aspecting my entire Mars-Uranus-Jupiter-Neptune T-square.

If we got no further than this, we would have narrowed an utterly unknown birth time to probably occurring between 1 AM and 5 AM and could then use conventional rectification methods from there. If we picked the Moon-Mercury square, it would have landed us within minutes of my recorded birth time. If we wanted to center on Novien Moon's square to natal Jupiter-Uranus, the exact aspect would have landed us within half an hour of my recorded birth time. Conventional rectification can go on from there.

Let's try another example to see where it would have led me. (I don't know the outcome as I start typing this.)

Thomas Jefferson was born April 13, 1743, in Shadwell, Virginia. No time is known for sure, though there are a few disconnected diary entries about surrounding events that could be interpreted many ways. I rectified his chart to 11 PM LMT, a time at the far other end of the day from what anyone else has proposed, based on my certainty that his Moon was in Sagittarius, not Scorpio. (His chart is so important in history that I couldn't leave it alone.) Does a Novien-based narrowing of possible birth times take us in the same direction?

Here are his Novien positions for 0:00 and 24:00 LAT on his birth date, sorted by 90°:
What non-lunar aspects do we see in the Novien over the course of the day, prioritizing faster planets? Mars and Saturn are square all day. Mercury opposes Uranus early in the day, then moves past and makes no further aspects. I might have been tempted to say the birth needed to be in the first half of the day to retain this except he has a partile Mercury-Uranus sextile at birth anyway; so this really tells us nothing useful.

We can check Novien positions aspecting his nativity. We find the following possibilities that change significantly over the course of the day:

• Novien Sun begins the day closely conjunct natal Jupiter. Jefferson was many Jupiterian things (statesman, diplomat, academic level scholar, wealthy landowner), but he was emphatically not a royalist as Sun conjunct a Leo Jupiter suggests. I would have avoided the earliest part of the day, tentatively.
• Novien Sun squares his Moon in the second half of the day (perhaps the late afternoon). That's not bad.
• Novien Venus conjoins natal Mercury at the end of the day. Jefferson was a gracious, gifted speaker with a diplomat's tongue (nonetheless barbed), but it's hard for me to say he was a Mercury-Venus type.
• Novien Mercury began the day exactly opposite natal Neptune, which doesn't fit at all. It ends the day, almost exactly square his Sun, which is fitting but perhaps too neutral to be sure about.

All I get from this is that he almost certainly was not born in the earliest hours of the day - say, not before about 8 AM (giving Mercury time to clear Neptune and the Sun-Jupiter conjunction time to distance) - and might have been born in the last three hours to provide the Sun-Mercury (less certain).


Ruling out the first eight hours changes Moon's possible range to 23°44' Tau - 4°39' Leo. This is too wide, nearly a quarter of the circle allowing almost every possible aspect. If (feeling a little desperate) we secide to go with the Mercury square to natal Sun, a crude (still a bit too early) 9 AM LAT chart updates our table as follows:
(Note that Mercury is still 4° from square natal Sun, so even this is too early if we are looking for that aspect.)

The main consideration at this point is whether Moon makes any telltale aspects. It moves from 22° Cancer to 5° Leo during the period. In this time, it makes no aspects in the Novien. In the natal, though, it makes quite a few - square natal Venus-Pluto at 24-25° Aries-Libra (their aspect is close; do we need anything to reinforce this?), an important-seeming conjunction with Mars at 28° Cancer (but he has an Aries Sun and, for most of the day, a Scorpio Moon).

Of these, we might think the Aries Mars is worth exploring. A 3° from it runs from 24°42' Cancer to 0°42' Leo. If we accept that, it leads us the range (approx) 9:45 to 11:06 PM.

FWIW (maybe not much, since both are speculative), this range does include the 11 PM I selected. This also isn't the strongest example, except that it allowed me to show method, how these tools might be used.