You don't need a telescope to see the wonders of the heavens.  You just need to be able to see a mouse’s whiskers twitch at a thousand feet in the dark.  But even if you wear bifocals and have to squint to read the bottom line at the optician, there’s still plenty for you to enjoy if you know what to look for.

First you must understand that the earth is turning, and so the heavens appear to be rotating as well, but not everything in the sky has a fixed position, relative to other celestial objects.  A few “stars” visible with the naked eye are not in fact stars at all, and a give-away is that they do not twinkle like stars either.  These are the tail lights of aeroplanes. 

Spanners

Using binoculars or a small telescope you will find other things.  These are communication satellites.  Sometimes the celestial object seems to have an incandescent “tail”.  This is a communication satellite that has been hit by a spanner at 30,000 m.p.h. or used for target practice by the Chinese government.

Leaving aside shining pin points in the sky, there are also vast areas of gaseous material that glow with iridescent colours.  These are referred to technically as “smog” and can best be viewed from a city centre hilltop at 10.00 a.m. on a winter evening.  The actual chemical involved is sodium, and it is found in streetlamps.

For those interested in anything further away, forget it.  Your eyes are too feeble.  The Sun is the big yellow thing and the Moon is the funny silvery thing that keeps changing shape.  The planets are big shining orbs that you see on television.  Alternatively they are tiny specks in the sky, which maybe look a bit red (Mars) but then again that could be dust in the atmosphere.  Likewise the Evening Star, otherwise known as the Morning Star, is in fact the planet Venus, and is white.  But maybe it too has a tinge of red.

Anything else is probably a star.

Procession

To amateur star-gazers, the stars are all arranged into regular shapes called constellations, which have been recognised since antiquity.  This is not actually so.  What the ancient Egyptians looked at is not the same as what we see now, as a result of a phenomenon known as “procession” which is caused by the earth wobbling erratically on its axis.  It is called “procession” because of the annual procession out of the beer tent at Glastonbury. In fact, what the ancients saw is not the same at all.  The stars are all buzzing about like bees in a bottle.  Only a cat would notice this of course, because cats have very sharp eyes, but the impression that all the constellations stay the same shape forever is nonsense.  Some stars are moving to the right, others to the left or down or up.  In a mere 100,000 years Ursa Major will have changed from the Great Bear to the Great Gorilla.

This has severe implications for horoscope writers.  It is no good trotting out the old nostrums about mandrake root being in potent humour when Scorpio is rising.  What if Scorpio now looks like a Poodle?  Astrologers have to earn their corn now, keeping up with a boiling firmament of stars that never stay still.  Of course astrology is not what it used to be anyway.  It’s all those ‘planes and satellites, and all that smog.

Mr P. Dantic of Tunbridge Wells points out that the phenomenon is called PrEcession not PrOcession.  Mystic Mog is grateful for this helpful intervention, and invites Mr Dantic to Naff Eff.

Clairvoyant Catrina Explains.... is an occasional series in which the Mystic Mog unravels Life's Big Questions. If you have a Big Question you think needs answering, please email clairvoyantcatrina@donowdo.com

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