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Before Railroads began upsetting the habits of people, each town or community had its own time, and there was no serious effort toward standardization. TRUE LOCAL TIME was employed. If the Sun crossed the meridian, it was noon. When it was noon in New York City, it was 11:56 A.M. in Philadelphia, ll:4 A.M. in Washington D.C., 12:04 P.M. in Hartford, Connecticut, and l2:l2 P.M. in Boston, Mass. This would seem quite confusing today, but it did not at the time, because few peop1e traveled from one of these towns to another. If you were born in Boston and you were like most folks, you lived in Boston and you died in Boston, and you had little interest in what the time might be in Hartford. Only Indians lived in California, and they didn't care.
As railroads began shortening the distance between towns, there had to be some standardization or a conductor would be changing his watch as he left each station. As a result, the earth was divided into 24 different time zones, corresponding with the 24 hours into which we divide each day, because folks couldn't get away from the fact that when it was midnight in one place, it was noon in another. When we state the time of day, we are merely giving an expression as to the relationship of one earth location to the Sun. This becomes very important in astrology, and when we express the time of a birth or an event it is quite essential that we know what kind of time we are ta1king about. It might be True Local Time, Greenwich Time, Standard Time, Daylight Saving Time or War Time. If we do not get this straight, a chart is incorrectly erected and we are looking at something that is not true.
It is customary to divide a circle into 360 equal parts and each of these parts is called a degree, and so we say there are 360 degrees to a circle, regardless of the size of the circle. It may be a circle an inch in diameter or a million miles in diameter. It still contains 360 degrees. There is no particular reason for dividing a circle into 360 degrees. It is generally believed that this figure came about because people believed there were 360 days in a year, which would make the average daily apparent motion of the Sun in the heavens one degree per day, but this is guess work. It may or may not be true.
All such measurements are actually arbitrary, but we adopt them so that each of us knows what the other is talking about. As to how accurate a measurement should be, it all depends upon the use to which it is to be put. Although in mechanics, it is often necessary to measure something to an accuracy of 1/10,000th of an inch, you would be little concerned about an error of an inch or even a foot if you were measuring the distance from New York to San Francisco.
The circle is further subdivided into smaller parts by dividing a degree into 60 minutes of arc and a minute into 60 seconds of arc. Minutes and seconds of arc should not be confused with minutes and seconds of time. In one case you are measuring time and in the other case you are measuring ratio of a complete circle. While there are 86,40O seconds of time to a day, there are 1,296,000 seconds of arc to a circle. Since there are 360 Degrees to a complete circle and 60 minutes to each degree, there are 360 x 60 or 21,600 minutes to a complete circle.
Since there are 60 seconds to a minute of arc, there are 60 x 60 seconds (3600) to a degree of arc, or 1,296,000 seconds of arc to a circle. You do not have to memorize these figures. They are only intended to impress you with the fact that there are a lot of seconds of arc to a circle, and that a second of arc is a very tiny measurement, which in most cases must not be regarded too seriously. For some purposes in astronomy it would have to be regarded very seriously.
In non-mystical astrology, it is seldom necessary to be more accurate than to the degree. There are mystical methods of astrology, which are difficult to prove or disprove, where accuracy to minutes of arc are essential, but these systems are largely hypothetical with no statistical evidence at this time to back them up. From a practical point-of-view, the student will do better to ignore such systems until he knows what he can do with systems that do not demand such hair-splitting accuracy. In other words, if you are going from New York to San Francisco, let us not bother trying to measure the distance in units of ten thousandths of an inch. It's like trying to count the grains of sand on the beach. You won't live that long. We are often faced with the paradox of an astrologer computing a birth horoscope to the exact degree, minute and second of arc, from birth time that is not accurately known to within a half hour. It is important to learn how much you can do with astrology without bothering with these split second calculations, for you will often find that the split- second calculator, while very impressive, turns up in the end with the wrong answer. Its like an evening that the writer spent at a local meeting of the Arnerican Statistical Association. A German mathematician who did not speak clear English devoted hours explaining how a problem could be done in two different ways. He illustrated by doing the problem on a blackboard both ways, and at the end of the evening obtained two different answers. It was too late to do the problem again, and the German mathematician was returning to Germany. We never did find out the right answer.
It is important to simplify truth, which is seldom accomplished, and while this will be our purpose, we will apologize in advance if our own efforts are not all that is to be desired. The important thing to realize is that for all practical purposes, a person can go a long way with astrology without bothering with split-second calculations, and in many cases, the astrologers who are most insistent on such calculations are consistently wrong in their interpretations because they never have learned nor discovered the true basic principles of astrology. Meanwhile, we have often found that some of our best astrologers were women who had only the most fundamental conception of mathematics. It isn't unusual for us to find an uneducated housewife who grasps the fundamentals of astrology far better than an individual with an almost endless string of college degrees. She has not learned so many things things are not so.
One important thing for you to remember is that there are 360 degrees to a circle, 60 minutes to a degree and 60 seconds to a minute of arc, and when you are measuring something to a second of arc, you are dividing the circle into l,296,000 parts.
We measure the circle of the heavens in degrees and we measure the surface of the earth in degrees. East and West measurements are called LONGITUDE, while north and south measurements are called LATITUDE when we are measuring the surface of the earth LONGITUDE is measured east or west from a line running north and south from GREENWICH, England. Thus, we say that New York is 74 degrees West Longitude, Chicago is 88 degrees West Longitude, and Los Angeles is ll8 degrees West Longitude, while Berlin is 13 degrees East Longitude, Moscow 36 degrees East Longitude, and Tokyo 140 degrees East Longitude. When you reach 180 degrees West Longitude, you meet l80 degrees EAST Longitude and you are at the International Date Line, where it is one day on one side of the line and another day on the other side.
Longitudinal lines run from the north to the south poles. Two such lines a degree apart would be about 70 miles apart at the equator, 35 miles apart at 45 degrees north or south of the equator, and zero degrees apart where they meet at the poles. All such lines meet at the po1es.
The heavens are also measured off in degrees, minutes and seconds of Longitude, starting at that point we call 0-Aries and continuing around the zodiac in a counterclockwise direction. For navigation and other purposes, they are measured from the same point but around the celestial equator, which means an extension of our earthly equator into space. This type of measurement, which will not concern you very much, is called RIGHT ASCENSION. It is abbreviated R.A..
LATITUDE is measured in degrees north or south of the equator. Miami is 26 degrees North Latitude, Atlanta or Los Angeles, 34 degrees North Latitude, San Francisco 38 and Washington D. C. 39 degrees North Latitude, Malone, N. Y. 45 degrees North Latitude, and therefore half way to the north pole. The poles of the earth are 90 degrees from the equator. Capetown, S. Africa is 34 degrees SOUTH Latitude, Buenos Aires 35 degrees South Latitude, Stanley in the Falkland Islands 52 degrees South Latitude.
Oddly, although we measure earthly Latitude from the equator, we measure celestial Latitude from the ecliptic, zodiac, or the path of the earth's orbit. When we measure north or south of a projection of the equator in the heavens, we do not call it Latitude but Declination. In other words, 45 degrees North Declination in the sky would be exactly over 45 degrees North Latitude on the earth. Celestial Declination is the equivalent of earthly Latitude, while celestial Latitude is something else again. This is an in-consistency of the language of astronomy.
The north pole is 90 degrees North Latitude for ANY Longitude, since all Longitudinal lines meet at the north pole. These Longitudinal lines run from the north to the south pole, while LATITUDINAL lines are parallel circles running all around the earth. The equator itself is the 0-Latitude line. A little circle one degree in radius with the north pole as its center will mark off 9 degree. North Latitude. A little larger circle two degrees in radius with the north pole as center will be degrees Worth Latitude. We have mentioned the north pole as the center of these circles inaccurately to better make the matter clear to you. Actually, the center of all Latitudinal circles must be considered the axis of the earth itself.
This information is necessary before we can begin to erect the chart, which, as far back as history will take us, has been called the horoscope. The word actually means HOUR SCOPE or H0UR CHART, and therefore would mean a chart accurate to within an hour. However, in common usage, it means anything from a chart erected for the exact minute to a newspaper column about astrology, and some astrologers can waste an entire evening fighting for their own personal conceptions of the meaning of the word.
We are well off, when we can know the zodiacal degree that was rising at the moment of birth at the particular location of birth, and that means knowing the time within a time-area of four minutes. The average time it takes a degree of the zodiac to cross the horizon is four minutes. You can figure that out for yourself. 360 degrees at minutes to a degree is 1440 minutes, and 24 hours of 60 minutes each equal 1440 minutes also.
We must allow for the fact that birth times have seldom been recorded accurately, and until recent years they were a matter of memory. When the child is born, the doctor is busy, and he or the nurse often record the time when the excitement is over, and they may estimate how long the excitement lasted. In one such case, the father who recorded the time with a stop-watch when he heard the first cry from outside the delivery room, recorded the time 10 minutes earlier than the physician who had been asked for an accurate time by the father who was an astrologer.
Down through the ages, the moment of birth has been considered by astrologers to be when the child first breaths as a separate entity, on his own, when he is, biologically, no longer a part of, nor dependent upon the mother for his oxygen. His life is then underway. He is on his own, and he has to keep those lungs pumping air. Scientists approaching astrology for the first time usually want to know why a horoscope is not erected for the moment of conception instead of the moment of birth. Who knows the moment of conception? The fact is that the functioning of the birth chart itself gives us reason to respect it. Whether or not a conception chart might also have value is completely beyond our investigative ability. We can offer no opinion on the matter. Bailey and Sepharial attempted to show a lunar interrelationship between moment of conception and moment of birth, but there was a good deal in the way of errors in their work and there is too little evidence at this time to determine whether they may have been right or wrong. They were both able men, and their work should ultimately be carefully tested to see whether any or all of their theories may have been true or false. That work has not been accomplished up to the present time.
We present a diagram that will help explain STANDARD TIME. It shows the earth divided into 24 equal parts or TIME ZONES. The sun is due left from the earth, immediately above the Greenwich meridian. Therefore, it is Noon at Greenwich. You will note that 15 degrees west (clockwise around the circle), it is 11:00 A.M. At another 15 degrees, or a total of 30 degrees west of Greenwich9 it is 10:00 A.M. When you reach 60 degrees we (near Halifax), it is 8:00 A.M. At 75 degrees west, you have reached Philadelphia1 and it is 7:CO A.M. This is the zone known as EASTERN STANDARD TIME.
At 90 degrees West Longitude, you are at St. Louis. It is 6:00 A.M. CENTRAL STANDARD TIME, and the Sun is rising there. At 105 degrees west Longitude, you are at Denver, Colorado. It is 5:00 A.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME. At 120 degrees west Longitude, we find that it is 4:00 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME in Fresno, California. At 150 degrees west Longitude, it is 2:00 A.M. in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Going the other way around the circle, it is 1:00 P.M. in Berlin 2:OO AM at Alexandria in Egypt, 6:00 P.M. at Calcutta, India, and 9:00 P.M. in Tokyo, Japan. All of this has to do with when it is Noon in Greenwich, England. If we twist our dial (the earth) 15 degrees to the left or counterclockwise, which is the motion of the earth in one hour it will be one hour later in all of these places, and the 15-degree west Longitude line will point directly at the Sun. It will now be 1:00 A.M. in Greenwich, 8:00 A.M. in Philadelphia, 7:00 A.M. in St. Louis; 6:00 A.M. in Denver, where the Sun is now rising, and 5:00 A.M. in Fresno, California. It will be midnight at 165 degrees east.
These 15-degree Longitudinal TIME Lines are not the beginning but the center of a Time Zone. Philadelphia is the center of the EASTERN STANDARD TIME Zone. New York, Boston, or Portland, Maine, are in the same zone. They are off to one side of center.
Logically, a Time Zone extends 71/2 degrees east and west from center, but different communities take liberties with any such rule. The whole state of Ohio is on Eastern Standard Time. Hazard, Ky., at 83 degrees West Longitude is on CENTRAL STANDARD TIME. The time setup around the world has a great many of these inconsistencies, and they complicate the work of the astrologer. When someone says he was born at 6:00 A.M., the astrologer must know, 6:00 A.M., WHAT KIND OF TIME? If the answer is TRUE LOCAL TIME, everything is simplified.
TRUE LOCAL TIME is expressed in terms of how long it has been, or will be, before or since the Sun crossed overhead at that location. DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME, of course is summer time, used in some places. Some psychologist apparently discovered that a man who won't rise before 7:00 A.M. will rise at 6:00 A.M. if you tell him it is 7:00 A.M. Not only that, he will go to bed earlier at night when you change the clock.
WAR TIME is similar to DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME, except that it was employed throughout the year.
In the majority of cases, you will know what kind of time you are dealing with, and complications will not come up, but the Rand McNally Road Atlas, which you may have, will show the time lines as practiced in all parts of the country.
It is quite simple to adjust STANDARD TIME to TRUE LOCAL TIME. Find the Latitude and Longitude of the birth location. If it happens to be a multiple of 15 degrees, and therefore on a Time Zone center, no adjustment is necessary.
If it is east or west of the Time Zone center, then an adjustment IS necessary. THE ADJUSTMENT WILL BE FOUR MINUTES FOR EACH DEGREE OF LONGITUDE. If the birth location is EAST of the Time Zone center, then ADD four minutes for each degree. If it is west of center, DEDUCT four minutes for each degree. Look at the diagram again. Note that when you go east, it gets later, and when you go west it gets earlier. When commercial airplanes can reach a speed of 1050 miles per hour, it will be possible to travel around the equator westward with the speed at which the earth rotates. Then, it can be perpetually noon for the people on the plane so long as it continues at a constant rate of speed. On the other hand, if another plane travels eastward at the same speed the Sun will rise every twelve hours instead of every twenty-four hours.
It is important to get this time business fixed in your mind. It is important to realize that for every degree you go west the true Local Time is four minutes earlier, and for every degree you go east, it is four minutes later. Thus, if you were traveling west at the equator, every time you traveled 70 miles, you would have to set your watch back four minutes to have it correct for that location. If you were at the Latitude of Malone, N.Y., you would have to do this every 35 miles. If you were 89 degrees North Longitude, you would have to do it at the end of every 1 and 1/5 mile. At the poles, there is actually no time of day, only time of year.
New York City is 74 degrees W.L. (West Longitude). The Time Zone center is 75 degrees W.L. Therefore, New York is one degree east of the Time Zone center, and True Local Time in New York is four minutes later than Eastern Standard Time. Washington, D.C. is 77 degrees W.L. Therefore, it is two degrees west of the Time Zone center, and True Local Time in Washington is eight minutes earlier than Eastern standard Time.
If you will study the diagram you should be able to grasp this, and it you do not grasp it, ask questions and allow us to explain it further. This is one thing you should make sure that you grasp accurately. Remember that west means earlier, while east means later. Fix this in your mind by selecting some town a certain number of degrees east of you and remembering that it is always later there. Then select a town to the west of you, and remember that it is always earlier there. Select towns a degree or more away, and figure out just how much earlier or later it is.
You will find a list of cities over the United States, as well a list of principal cities around the world, in the front of the book, and it will give the Longitude and Latitude of each place. When you deal with a town too small to be mentioned, select the nearest town of size. In most cases, there will be some town near by that is listed. If you happen to be using some Table of Houses that does not supply this information, it can be obtained from the WORLD ALMANAC, or from THE 200 YEAR EPHEMERlS by Hugh MacCraig.
SIDEREAL TIME
Now, we come to an entirely different kind of time, known as SIDEREAL TIME. This is the kind of time we really have to employ in astrology. We have to apply it ultimately. Just as NOON is when the Sun is overhead in TRUE LOCAL TIME, Sidereal Time deals with a certain location on the earth in relation to the zodiac. Sidereal Time is an entirely different kind of time from any other you know. To compare ordinary time with Sidereal Time is not like comparing Daylight Time with Standard Time. A minute of Daylight Time has the same duration as a minute of Standard Time. Not so with Sidereal Time. The days are shorter, the hours are shorter, the minutes are shorter and the seconds are shorter. A second of Sidereal Time is 97+ percent as long as a second of clock time. This may not seem like much of a difference, but it grows very large. It causes a star to rise four minutes later every night.
The dictionary or even textbooks will tell you that SIDEREAL TIME means STAR TIME, but this is an inaccuracy, because in 13,000 years, this theme would be just 100% wrong. It will not make any real difference in a lifetime, but if perpetuated for 13,000 years, the 100% inaccuracy would actually occur. SIDEREAL TIME is still based on an earth motion and does not actually coincide with the stars. It is still a matter that is determined by the earth- Sun relationship.
For example, 0:00 Sidereal Time is when 0 degrees of Aries of the zodiac of the equinoxes is overhead. In the Sidereal Zodiac, based on the fixed stars, today, 0:00 Sidereal Time is when 6-Pisces is overhead. There is a slippage of 24 degrees since the two zodiacs coincided.
Dogma has played an important part in molding certain parts of civilization. Modern astronomy, which long endeavored to pass off astrology as superstition, because this was originally demanded by the dogma of the church (which astronomy has forgotten) continues to make all of its measurements from the astrological points. Instead of measuring SIDEREAL Time from the fixed stars, it is measured from the astrological zodiac. Although insisting on a star zodiac, measurements of time are all made from the old astrological zodiac of the ancients. When the Nautical Almanac is published each year and universally employed, Right Ascension positions are published, but they are measured from 0-Aries of the astrological zodiac. The stars are not employed as measuring-points.
Although we mention these factors, they are of no importance or significance from a practical view point. The important thing is that after you determine TRUE LOCAL TIME, it is essential that you convert it into SIDEREAL TIME. The HOROSCOPE must be erected from SIDEREAL TIME. The above indiscrepancies are of no significance, unless you intend hanging around for more than 100 years, when an error of significance would occur. In 6,500 years, an error of 50% would occur, but in 100 years, the error would be little more than one percent. If you intend practicing astrology for more than 100 years, it might be well to look into the matter.
After you have determined when you were born according to TRUE LOCAL TIME, then you must convert TRUE LOCAL TIME into SIDEREAL TIME. This is not complicated, so don't let it scare you. We have mentioned 80 many different kinds of time that you may be confused, but in that event, read this Lesson several times, and if it is not clear to you then, tell us and let us go into it with you thoroughly and personally. The purpose of SIDEREAL TIME is to allow you to record the exact position of the earth within the zodiac at any given moment. One at the principal things we want to know is: WHAT PART OF THE ZODIAC WAS CROSSING THE HORIZON?
Your principal tools in astrology are your TABLE OF HOUSES and your EPHEMERIS. Your TABLE OF HOUSES enables you to fix the earth within the zodiac for any given moment. Your EPHEMERIS is a planetary TIME TABLE. Just as a railroad timetable will show you where your train should be at any given time, an EPHEMERIS will tell you where the planets will be on any given day, or where they were on any particular day in the past. Because the planets move in accord with mathematical laws, it is possible to compute their positions for any day, thousands of years in the past or thousands of years in the future. In a planetarium, where these mathematical laws are allowed to operate in a mechanism, the planetary positions for any time, past or future, are supplied automatically. Astronomers often set the machinery running backward until they can look at the heavens at the supposed time of the birth of Christ. They look at a conjunction of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and speculate upon that being the star of Bethlehem.
Open your EPHEMERIS to any page. There are two pages of data for each month of each year. On any left hand page, the first column gives the day of the month (TAG), and the second column is headed SIDEREAL TIME or STERNZEIT. Look down this column. You will note that the Sidereal Time changes about for minutes every day. This is actually the time it takes the earth to move approximately one degree in its ellipse around the Sun, or how long it takes the Sun, by apparent motion, to move approximately one degree from our earthly point of view. If you look at the third column on the page, you will see that the Sun moves about one degree per day. In other words, the daily change you see in one column is the same change you see in the other column, one expressed in time, the other in zodiacal motion.
At the top of the Sidereal Time column, you will see the letters R. M. S. These letters stand for HOURS, MINUTES and SECONDS, so the Sidereal Time is expressed very accurately in hours, minutes and seconds. However, this is the Sidereal Time in Greenwich. The Sidereal Time at a given time on any particular day of the year is approximately the same for any year. You will note this if you examine your Ephemeris. For example, on July 1st, 1956, it is given as 18 hours, 36 minutes and 5 seconds, while on July 1st, 1957, it is given as 18 hours, 35 minutes and 8 seconds, a difference of 57 seconds. This small discrepancy is due to the fact that a year is not an exact number of days but is 365 and a fraction days.
Thus, if you happened to use the Sidereal Time for the right day of the year but the wrong year, the error would not be sufficient to alter a chart or horoscope by one degree, because it takes about four minutes on the average for one degree of the zodiac to rise. The average error in the recording of a birth time is greater than this. If we were to believe in the accuracy of recorded birth times, we would have to conclude that 90% of the people are born exactly as the minute hand of a clock touches the hour or half hour.
Remember that the Sidereal Time given is for Greenwich, England, and now, here is something that is very important. Some Ephemerides give the Sidereal Time at NOON while others give the Sidereal Time for MIDNIGHT. You must know which you are using. In the case of DIE DEIJTSCHE EPHEMERIDE which we supply, SIDEREAL TIME IS GIVEN FOR NOON FOR THE YEARS l900-1930 AND FOR MIDNIGHT FROM 1931 TO 1960 INCLUSIVE. This has been the source of a great many errors on the part of students. If you look, for example, at the Sidereal Time given for July 1st, l9O8, instead of finding it as given above you will discover it to be given as 6 hours, 36 minutes and 35 seconds, a difference of twelve hours.
Record this fact indelibly in your mind that the Sidereal Time is given for Noon prior to 1931 and Midnight at the BEGINNING of the day from January 1st, 1931 on.
Just as Standard Time or True Local Time differs for a given moment around the world, Sidereal Time does the same thing. You will note that Sidereal Time runs from zero to 24 hours, like navigation time. It does not go up to 12 and start over again. There is no A.M. and P.M. When it is Noon at Greenwich, it is 6:OO A.M. in St. Louis, and when the Sidereal Time is 12:00 at Greenwich, it will be 6:00 in St. Louis. This will work exactly the same. The difference between True Local Time and Sidereal Time lies in the fact that with True Local Time, it is always 12:00 Noon when the Sun is directly on the meridian overhead, but with Sidereal Time, if it is 12:00 at Noon today, it will be 12:04 at Noon tomorrow. In other words, instead of the Sun being directly overhead, the same degree of the zodiac will be directly overhead. If you could see the zodiacal degrees, you would see the same degree overhead every time the Sidereal Time reached 12:00.
If you record the Sidereal Time tonight when a fixed star is directly overhead at that same Sidereal Time tomorrow night, that same fixed star will be directly overhead. This will work during your lifetime, but there wouId ultimately be an error due to the precession of the equinoxes. Although this will work for a fixed star, it will not work for a planet, because the planets move in relation to the fixed stars. The zodiac also moves in relation the fixed stars, but the circle is completed only once in approximately 26,000 years.
True Local Time, Standard Time, Daylight Saving Time or War Time are all based on the position of the Sun in the sky, but Sidereal Time is based on the position of the zodiac in the sky.
Astrologers often have some very complicated methods of computing Sidereal Time which are unnecessary if you clearly understand the difference between True Local Time and Sidereal Time, it you correctly visualize the difference, and if you do not when you complete this Lesson, you better start asking questions.
Let us compare the Sidereal Time at Noon in Greenwich with the Sidereal Time at Noon in St, Louis which is 90 degrees away. Noon in St. Louis is 6 hours later, one quarter of a day. Therefore, since Sidereal Time at Noon changes approximately 4 minutes in a full 24 hour day, it will change one minute during the time it takes the earth to make one quarter turn on its axis, from the time that Greenwich faces the Sun until St. Louis faces the Sun. If you happen to ignore this factor, your error will be only one minute. Do you think you know your birth time so accurately that this minute will make a difference? In any event, the error will be but one-quarter of a degree in the placement of the earth within the zodiac. When you want this degree of accuracy you can pay attention to this factor. Until you need that kind of accuracy you can forget it if you choose. If you accidentally forget it, the damage is not likely to be noticed. We explain this factor, carefully, because the attempt to gain unnecessary accuracy has often confused a student to the point where he never got beyond it. It you understand what this correction is all about, you can make it in your head. Until you are well under way, you can ignore it.
It stands to reason that if the Sidereal Time is 12:00 at Noon, it is 13:00 at 1:00 P.M. If the Sidereal Time is 6:44 at Noon, it is 7:44 at 1:00 P.M. If the Sidereal Time is 6:44 at Noon, it was 5:44 at ll:O0 A.M. This is simple addition and subtraction, and it is not something that should trouble you very much.
When you are ready to erect a Horoscope, simply take the Sidereal Time out of the ephemeris, making sure whether it is the Side-real Time at Noon or Midnight. Then, it is up to you to compute the Sidereal Time AT BIRTH. You merely add or subtract. How long was the birth before or after Noon or Midnight? Make the adjustment to establish the SIDEREAL TIME AT BIRTH.
Let us have an example.
A person was born at 11:29 P.M. on June 3rd, 1905 at Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Table in the front of the TABLE OF HOUSES shows us that Cheyenne is at 105 degrees West Longitude, exactly on the center of the MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME ZONE. Therefore, no correction is necessary for TRUE Local TIME, which will be exactly the same as Standard Time. The Ephemeris tells us that the Sidereal Time at Greenwich on June 3rd, 1905 at Noon was 4 hours 45 minutes and 5 seconds. Let us forget the 5 seconds and proceed.
SIDEREAL TIME AT NOON ..4:45
TIME OF BIRTH .................+11:29
_________________________________________________
SIDEREAL TIME AT BIRTH.15:74
Because there are only 60 minutes in an hour, we can express 15:74 as 16:14. Thus, the Sidereal Time at birth was 16:14.
This is still inaccurate to one and a traction minutes because we did not make the correction in Sidereal Time for the time it took the face of the earth to turn from Greenwich to Cheyenne, but it is highly improbably that the furnished birth time is accurate to a minute and a quarter. Did the physician check his watch and its accuracy prior to the birth? Was it a stop watch? Did somebody press the button at that exact moment of the first cry? It we are off by l minutes, we have made an error of less than one degree in the ascendant of the chart we are about to erect. It is quite common for astrologers to try to gain an accuracy of minutes and seconds and never think of questioning the accuracy of the recorded birth time itself.
Now, let us assume that the above birth was 11:29 A.M. instead of ll:29 P.M. That would mean that it was 31 minutes before Noon. So; instead of adding the birth time to the Sidereal Time of 4:45 at Noon, we would deduct 31 minutes from 4:45 and get a Sidereal Time at birth of 4:14. Some students get confused as to whether they should add or subtract. If this happens to you, you can do it another way, and you will always be adding.
Instead of deducting 31 minutes, let us add the birth time, even though it is an A.M. birth. If the Sidereal Time was 4:45 at Noon, add 12 hours and it will be 16:45 at midnight, and the birth was 11 hours and 29 minutes after midnight it occurred at 11:29 A.M.
SIDEREAL TIME AT NOON ....4:45
NOON TO MIDNIGHT ............12:00
TIME OF BIRTH .....................11:29
______________________________________________________
27:74
Here again, we can change 27:74 to 28:l4, because there are only 60 minutes in an hour, but now we have a figure that is greater than 24 hours, and since Sidereal Time runs only up to 24:00 hours, we deduct 24:00 from 28:l4, getting 4:14, exactly the same answer we obtained above. You can choose either method, the one that suits you best.
Be sure you understand this Lesson. Any error or misconception here might be difficult to overcome later.
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