The moon moved?!

I rarely report on what's going on with me in real time, but my headache this week was caused by reading an essay by Steven Forrest who was discussing the parallax moon, or, the concept that since the earth is 8,000 miles wide, the moon might appear in a slightly different place, sky-wise, depending on where you're standing (or being birthed, as is the case with astrology as a tool).

He went on to say that your astrology software (and my astrology software) calculates your moon's degree and minute by assuming you were born at the center of the earth. So off I went to locate a parallax moon calculator, which calculates the position of the moon from where you physically were on the surface of the earth. My own moon moved by 2 minutes, which is basically nothing, but the moons of everyone else I know seem to have moved 10 or 20 minutes. These are small amounts, but with major transits, precision is everything, so being off by 20 minutes could mean being off by months. I looked at the new moon positions of people I'm close to who had major recent transits to their moons, and guess what: shifting to the correct degree and minute captured their actual transit perfectly. One transit was off by a year and a half. That's a big deal.

Don't worry, everything else is too far away to move in your chart: this is just a moon issue.

Honestly, I thought I was already pretty bad by harping on the fact that software doesn't account for the fact that the solar system is in motion and you have to do a little bit of transit math if you want your transits to be correct. Now the moon is in the wrong place? 

I sound ungrateful: computers have been a game changer for astrology. There are living astrologers who had to do this all by hand, and trust me, I would want nothing to do with that, even knowing that astrology gives you a boon of information. I am thankful for the software. I am just temporarily mad at it.

So, if you're concerned about the location of your moon, and worried that this news has thrown your life into disarray (it's disruptive to me, obviously), a lot of astrology software/apps will let you look at your chart from a heliocentric position (in other words, from the view of the sun), a geocentric position (you are in the center of the earth), or a topocentric position (this is the one you want if you want to know where your moon actually is). I assure you that your moon degree and minute is probably pretty close to the geocentric position. No one I know has had their moon sign changed due to this adjustment, and I looked at a LOT of people. My solar return moon for this year was in the wrong sign, though, so that was mildly disconcerting.

Here's a parallax moon calculator that probably won't steal your identity (but will give you one of those security warnings).

New video: the Presley family, water houses, and addiction (an 8th house topic for Scorpio month)