Stalking the wild ephemeris

Someone asked me a couple of questions about an ephemeris.
Here's the poop...

An ephemeris is a table that shows the positions of the plaets and other celestial bodies. It is usually organized in a day-to-day format with the positions shown for noon (12h) Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). By the way, GMT is sometimes called "Universal Time" (UT). An example of an ephemeris is shown, below:

In the example, the Sun is positioned at 16°30'51" in the sign of Sagittarius. The Moon is shown as being located at position 8°23' of the sign Sagittarius. An excellent ephemeris may be otained online — free for personal use — at AstoDienst. Hardcopies of several ephemerides may also be purchased at most bookstores in the "Astronomy" section for $10 or under.

Please note that positions given for celestial bodies might differ slightly from ephemeris to ephemeris. Differences could be a result of the different algorithms being used to calculate the position of the objects, or it could be that one ephemeris is showing astronomical positions rather than astological positions (see "Precession of the Equinoxes" for an explanation).

© 2007 Sapphire @ Blogspot.com