The Full Rose Moon
THE SAGITTARIUS FULL MOON & TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 1:14 pm PDT
The Moon and Sun Opposed at 24 degrees Sagittarius/Gemini
In my garden right now the roses are taking center stage commencing their first bloom of the season. One of my favorites, pictured here, a gorgeous red hybrid tea named appropriately Rosa 'Ingrid Bergman' is a deep, silky lipstick red with an incredible fragrance to match. I just picked the first bloom recently to bring inside for us to enjoy and had to measure it because it was so incredibly large. I discovered it was a whopping seven inches across.
The Full Moon each June, more often than not, falls in the optimistic, larger-than-life, Jupiter-ruled sign of Sagittarius. According to the Farmer's Almanac, it is considered the Full "Rose" Moon, an apt name for this time of year in the northern hemisphere. In Rex E. Bill's The Rulership Book, he notes that while Venus rules roses in general, red roses in particular are ruled by Jupiter, which makes complete sense. When you observe a perfectly gorgeous red rose, your heart does soar! And with Jupiter as the planetary ruler or "Lord" of today's Full Moon and Lunar Eclipse, the Full Rose Moon is especially germane.
The Full Moon occurs when the Sun and Moon face each other from opposite signs of the zodiac wheel, the time each month when our luminaries highlight a different pair of polar signs. Magnetic complements, opposing signs are dualities that naturally attract, but just as often repel each other, one possessing gifts the other needs, but doesn't always want. Today's perfect circle of light will fall in the dynamic oppositional duo of Sagittarius and Gemini. However, this Full Moon is no ordinary one, for this time around the light of the Moon will be obscured by our very own home planet. At this Full Moon, the Earth's shadow will fall across Luna's bright face. Today is the first lunar eclipse of the year, and a total one at that.
A lunar eclipse occurs whenever the Sun, Moon and Earth align in such precision that the Moon passes through the Earth's shadow. Because of the tilt of the moon's orbit around Earth, the moon usually passes above or below, so no lunar eclipse occurs. Lunar eclipses happen every six months when a Full Moon falls close enough to one of the lunar nodes, which mark the intersection of the Moon's orbit around the Earth with the Earth's orbit around the Sun, appropriately called the "ecliptic." These are the points where the moon, in its orbit, crosses from south of the ecliptic plane to the north (which is the ascending or north node); and the opposite point where the moon crosses from north to south (the descending or south node). The nodes mark the "sweet spot" where all three bodies line up and an eclipse is the result.
During a total eclipse, the Moon does not completely disappear, instead it turns a shade of red that can vary from a light coppery orange-red to a deep rose red, shown here in this photo of last December's total eclipse. The color is due to the deflection or "scattering" of the sun's light by particles in the Earth's atmosphere. Shorter wavelengths are more likely to be scattered, so longer wavelengths prevail which we perceive as red.
Sandwiched between two partial solar eclipses, today's lunar eclipse is "Act Two" of three consecutive eclipses, and will occur at the Moon's north, or ascending node, with the Moon only one slim degree away from a perfect conjunction. The closer a Full Moon is to one of the nodes, the more total the lunar eclipse, and today's will last for unusually long duration. Visible from every continent except North America, the Moon will spend almost two hours fully engulfed in the Earth's shadow, the longest lunar eclipse in 11 years. Scientists think that the appearance of the eclipse might be affected by Chile's erupting Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano, currently causing spectacular sunsets around the southern hemisphere. The exhaust from the volcano could possibly turn this eclipse an especially deep red hue.
Astrologer Gary Caton noted other special qualities about this eclipse in his article for The Mountain Astrologer magazine:
The total Lunar Eclipse of June 15, 2011 is a rare one because it is a central eclipse, which means that the Moon passes right through the very heart of the Earth's shadow. This is because it is also right in the middle of its family, i.e. its Saros series, and eclipses often reach their greatest totality at the midpoint of the series, when the astronomical alignments are most precise.
So that's the nuts and bolts of the lunar eclipse, but what does it mean for us personally?
In order to fully understand the effects of a lunar eclipse, it helps to reflect on the fundamentals: lunar eclipses occur only at Full Moons, when the Sun and Moon are in opposition. Oppositions carry a special brand of dynamism and magic, as well as challenge. They are pairings of energies that when integrated provide the missing nutrients the other sign lacks, the necessary minerals needed to balance the system. Oppositions are seeking their fulcrum point always, but when this process fails, when these opposing signs dig in their heels and refuse to budge, that is when we often see the extremes in sign expression. For any sign, like any human quality, taken to excess, their ordinarily fine assets can rapidly turn sour and become vices. The counterbalance is to bring forth the higher expression of the sign that sits and watches from the other side of the ring.
The two opposing signs of a lunar eclipse also reveal what is "up" for humanity, where the evolutionary focus is currently, what lessons we are working on. They provide clues as to where we need to achieve better equilibrium, and what is important to build in as well as release, on both personal and collective levels. With Gemini and Sagittarius as eclipse conductors, communication, the ways in which we connect and transfer information and other goods (Gemini), and education, knowledge, philosophy, spirituality and religion (Sagittarius) are examples of issues where the winds of change are blowing.
Gemini is concerned with the transmission of relevant information needed to function effectively in life, so we see some of our finest writers and journalists with this sign emphasized in their charts. While Sagittarius, the Archer, is primarily concerned with our the higher ideals, guiding principles, foreign cultures, languages, spirituality, religion, as well as travel and adventure. Here we find our philosophers, explorers, spiritual leaders, professors, and theorists. Sagittarius is about journeying into other realms, literally and figuratively, physically and imaginatively. Sag is dedicated to the expansion of one's perspective, however that can be achieved.
When Gemini is overdoing it, he tends to miss the forest for the trees. Geminis are excellent communicators and inexhaustibly curious learners, but they can (and I am talking about the "pure sign" here) overemphasize trivia, have difficulty placing the details in the grander scheme, clarifying the "part" within the context of the whole. They tend to report, rather than inspire. So down comes Sagittarius in her hot air balloon with her exciting observations of the bigger picture, that long-range, wide-screen vantage point of possibility. For her, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, any day and for darn sure. High-flying Sagittarius is the perfect remedy for fact-bound Gemini.
"Overripe" Sagittarius, on the other hand, can result in a lack of sufficient regard for the important details of life and an undisciplined, rambling mind. Concise is not to be found in her dictionary. Every thought seems to expand into an opus with Sagittarius — and the tangent is always tantalizing. A single-minded focus on "just the facts" is not the archer's strong suit. We see this same issue in the mythological Jupiter, off philandering with his favorite kind of "tangent" — nymphs — conveniently "forgetting" the minor detail of matrimony, his marriage to Juno. Sagittarius would rather not concerned herself with the "minor" issues. She hasn't yet learned the lesson that Gemini knows so well: little things tend to add up to big ones.
Something else that makes this eclipse more interesting is that the degree falls very close to the Galactic Center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way is a vast rotating spiral of gas, dust, and hundreds of billions of stars. Our Sun and planetary system is located in the outer reaches of the galaxy. When we look at the Milky Way in the night sky, we are viewing it edge-on from our location one of its outer arms. Galileo first examined the Milky Way with a small telescope, and discovered it was comprised of a multitude of individual stars, "so numerous as almost to surpass belief" he wrote.
In the center of the Milky Way is a bar-shaped galactic "bulge" that harbors a supermassive black hole with a mass equal to about 3 million suns. Supermassive black holes are thought to lie at the center of most large galaxies. Chandra, an orbiting x-ray telescope, is providing us with much higher resolution images, and is able to pick up light in the invisible x-ray spectrum, detecting x-ray emissions from very hot regions of the Universe such as exploded stars, clusters of galaxies, and matter around black holes. X-ray observations indicate that a large amount of energy is produced in the centers of many galaxies, possibly by the in-fall of matter into a black hole.
"X-rays are a highly energetic form of light, not visible to human eyes. Light can take on many forms — including radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, x-ray and gamma radiation. Very low temperatures (hundreds of degrees below zero Celsius) produce mostly low energy radio and microwave photons, whereas cool bodies like ours (about 30 degrees Celsius) produce largely infrared radiation. Objects at very high temperatures (millions of degrees Celsius) emit most of their energy as x-rays." *
Every year, even after gardening in my same little spot for so long, I am always amazed at how the plants in my garden spring back from the dead of winter. It really is a miracle, the strong life force on our lovely planet Earth. So on this special Full "Rose" Moon and Lunar Eclipse, number two of three, in soaringly optimistic Sagittarius, sign of the pilgrim soul and the red, red rose, conjunct that infinite Black Hole in the center of our MIlky Way galaxy, we can either take our inspiration in the lovely Gemini details: the smallest of things, like a beautiful garden rose; or in those wildly awesome objects we are discovering in our boundless, infinite Universe, all of which may or may not be big enough for Sagittarius!
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Related Essays
Sunlight and Shadow — The Gemini New Moon and Solar Eclipse (June 1, 2011)
All That You Can't Leave Behind — The Sagittarius New Moon (December 5, 2010)
The "Fool" Moon — The Sagittarius Full Moon (May 2010)
*The Chandra website at Harvard University offers excellent entry-level articles that are easy to understand. If you are Gemini curious about about black hole formation and our "Jupiterian" Milky Way Galaxy, visit their informative site.
Photo of the Dec. 20, 2010 total lunar eclipse from Cochranville, Pa. taken by Kevin R. Witman, using a Meade LX50 10" Schmidt Cassegrain telescope and a Canon XS DSLR camera.
For more information on the astronomy and geometry of Lunar Eclipses, here's a comprehensive Wikipedia article with helpful charts and diagrams.
© 2012 Elaine Kalantarian, all rights reserved