Talk:Astrological sign

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Astrological sign for graphic designers

Some artists/designers referring to this Wikipedia page might still find it difficult to reproduce the astrological signs in high-resolution details. I've found an easy way. Would someone familiar with this article please include this info in the article (in the proper place and style)?

To produce the 12 signs in a Windows environment, input "^_`abcdefghi" and apply the "Wingdings" font. Voila, you can enlarge to say 50 point font, and output your graphic file to EPS/PNG/JPG format for very fine graphic details.

I will try to demonstrate it here:

^_`abcdefghi.

Regards, Jason — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.187.188.153 (talk • contribs) August 9, 2006 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 26 November 2024

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The end of Aquarius is February 18 and the start of Pisces is February 19 Aw021809 (talk) 02:01, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. DonIago (talk) 04:27, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I was born 19th February and I know I'm a Pisces. There are many wiki pages that have it shown as 19th of February. Examples: Pisces (astrology), February (Symbols section), Sidereal and tropical astrology (3/17 Image) and probably more. I hope it gets changed because for my whole life I thought I was a Pisces. I will be checking everyday to see if it has changed. Thank you! 2A0A:EF40:52:BD01:7C1D:F5A7:AAB7:1FC7 (talk) 21:17, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It changes from year to year. We should give the average date. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:19, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. This year it starts February 18th and if any also change, then maybe change them too! 2A0A:EF40:52:BD01:7C1D:F5A7:AAB7:1FC7 (talk) 15:46, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

On the source of current values:

I understand Dr Tatum got these values from the newspaper Times Colonist. I suspect the newspaper got the values from Sally Brompton. They have the same dates on their website. I don't see a way to contact Sally, so I'm not sure we will ever know how they got these values. I tried a number of years, going back to 1850, and I think every timezone and locale, and could not get these values.

Computing averages:

Regarding the suggestion of taking the average. How about using UTC as a rough representative of the average over timezones, and using 2000 as a rough approximation of the average between 1900 and 2100?

To support the idea of choosing the range from 1900 to 2100, and estimating the average by choosing 2000 as representative, consider the image at the following link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year

The title of the image is "Leap shifting of the Gregorian calendar", and subtitle "Date of summer solstice over 500 years".

I did try computing all this with some scripts, but also found a website that can provide a year of ecliptic longitude events in tabular form, for any timezone. In case anyone finds that site useful, here it is.

https://horoscopes.astro-seek.com/astrological-calendar-2000

If you'd rather have the average values skewed to what we'll be seeing in coming years, you might want the average between 2000 and 2100, in which case you might just use 2050 as a representative year. These events will be earlier and earlier until the year 2100, so the older values may be considered less useful.

Assigning two boundary dates to a single moment in time

So I'll use the term "event" or "ecliptic longitude event", for, for example, the moment the sun moves from Aquarius to Pisces, the ecliptic longitude of the sun is 330°.

So what I'm not sure how to resolve, is how to take an event, which can happen at any instant throughout the day, and determine the end date for the previous sign, and the start date for the next sign.

A given event can only be assigned to one of these dates. Is it assigned to the end date of previous sign, or the start date of the next sign? This seemed a bit ambiguous to me. Though I suppose people celebrate the beginning of Summer on the day the sun pass over Tropic of Cancer, but who would protest if they called the same day the end of Spring?

So to resolve this, I considered, effectively, making the split at noon, rather than midnight. If an event occurred before noon, then the sign starts that day. If the event occured after noon, the sign starts the next day. And whichever date is assinged to start the sign, the date preceding that becomes the end date for the previous sign.

What do other people think about this? Especially the idea that zodiac signs tend to have end date and start dates as two separate dates, and how to resolve this with the fact that the boundaries are really just an event at a instantaneous moment at any time of the day.

Draft values:

So with the assumptions described above, here are draft values:


sign,old_start,new_start,proof
ari,03-21,03-20,2000-03-20 07:35:15.576231+00:00
tau,04-21,04-20,2000-04-19 18:39:33.200961+00:00
gem,05-22,05-21,2000-05-20 17:49:22.498766+00:00
can,06-22,06-21,2000-06-21 01:47:39.260896+00:00
leo,07-24,07-23,2000-07-22 12:42:51.297046+00:00
vir,08-24,08-23,2000-08-22 19:48:50.384594+00:00
lib,09-24,09-23,2000-09-22 17:27:57.187024+00:00
sco,10-24,10-23,2000-10-23 02:47:46.654716+00:00
sgr,11-23,11-22,2000-11-22 00:19:39.078719+00:00
cap,12-22,12-22,2000-12-21 13:37:52.025216+00:00
aqr,01-21,01-21,2000-01-20 18:23:12.153273+00:00
psc,02-20,02-19,2000-02-19 08:33:18.750747+00:00

The first column is the IAU abbreviations for convenience, though I think they're meant for the IAU zodiacs. The second column is the current values, as they appear on this Wikipedia article today. Third column is my drafted and proposed changes. To summarize, they are one day sooner, except for Capricorn and Aquarius, where they are unchanged. The last column is the "proof", showing the UTC dates and times computed for the events in the year 2000, and you can check that if an event occurred in the afternoon, then the next sign start date is assigned to the next date.

You can also double check these dates against the tabular form found at astro-seek dot com webpage linked above. Whyionkegicy (talk) 04:46, 21 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Read WP:OR. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:37, 21 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 6 May 2025

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Change the "Sun Sign Start/End Dates" section in the table under the "Western astrological correspondence chart" section to sort by appearance in a calendar year when sorted in ascending/descending order. The ascending/descending order of sorting by the day of the month does not make sense to me. I am not very involved in astrology, I just wanted to make sure this is not unintentional. 66.253.196.25 (talk) 00:54, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I see what you're talking about, but I'm not sure whether there's a way to resolve it short of breaking the day and month into separate columns. Hopefully a more coding-savvy editor will weigh in. DonIago (talk) 02:19, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done I used the template:dts to accomplish. The trade off was needing to remove the wikilinks to the months, but that seemed unnecessary anyway. meamemg (talk) 14:34, 6 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]