The ancient Chinese astrologers worked with little to no contact with those of the Greek world. This relative isolation means the constellations we know in the western world are unheard of in Chinese astrology. They have a system entirely their own. The astrologers of ancient China divided their sky into 31 sections or regions. The three sections, which make up the north celestial pole are...

"Hey, the constellations don't line up anymore!" When the ancient Babylonians first started tracking the motions of the heavens, they divided the sky into 30-degree increments and gave each section over to the rule of a constellation.  This is the Zodiac, the band of the sky that all of the heavenly bodies move through.  It's a strip of sky about seven degrees across.  But...

No matter how far along you are in your sophistication as an amateur astronomer, there is always one fundamental moment that we all go back to.  That is that very first moment that we went out where you could really see the cosmos well and you took in the night sky.  For city dwellers, this is a revelation as profound as if we discovered aliens living among us.  Most of us have...