Bad Astronomy. Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'

photograph them ten times a day. That stretches credulity beyond the breaking point. I think the Truth Is Out There. It just isn’t down here.

It frustrates me to see true believers claim that every light in the sky is an alien spaceship. However, it gives me pause when I remember that I was once fooled by a flock of ducks on a dark night at the most rational of locations, a rocket launch. It helps me remember that anyone can get fooled; I just wish that more people would be more critical about what they see.

As for that Shuttle launch, it was successful despite any fowl play. The camera was installed perfectly, and returned many gigabytes of interesting and useful information about what is really going on in space. And I will admit it here, in this book, for the first time: in some of those images I did see evidence of intelligent life in space. In many images from Hubble I have seen long, bright streaks of light that were clearly not cosmic ray tracks, misguided tracking, asteroids, comets, or moons.

What were they, then? They weren’t alien spaceships. The long streaks were caused by human-built satellites, placed in orbits higher than Hubble. As they passed through Hubble’s field of view, their motion left a streak of light.

We have met life in space, and it is us.

21. Mars Is in the Seventh House, but Venus Has Left the Building: Why Astrology Doesn’t Work

“The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

People say the weirdest things.

A while back, my sister threw herself a nice birthday party. She invited her friends, her family, and her coworkers, and we all had a great time. She had a special setup for kids to play and do artwork, and while I was chatting with some of the other party-goers my daughter ran up to me to show me pictures she had drawn. One drawing in particular caught my eye. I said, “Hey, that looks like an object I study at work!”

A woman next to me asked, “What is it you do?”

“I’m an astronomer,” I replied.

Her eyes got wide and her face lit up. “That’s so cool!” she said. “I’m terrible at astronomy. I failed it in college.”

Well, what do you say to that? I let it slide, and we talked for a while about this and that. A few minutes later, she was commenting on one of the people at the party, and said, “Oh, he’s a Libra; all Libras do that.”

Ah! Now I knew why she failed astronomy. I refrained from saying anything out loud about astrology, though. I knew better.

The basic premise of astrology is simple: the arrangement of the stars and planets at the time of our birth affects our lives. There is no evidence to show that this is true, but people believe it nonetheless. A 1984 Gallup poll showed that 55 percent of American teenagers believe in astrology. Clearly, astrology is popular.

But that doesn’t make it right.

Astrology is like a religion to its devotees. Many religions require faith without proof. In some sense, proof is anathema to these beliefs; you are supposed to believe without needing to see any evidence. Astrology is the same way. If someone tries to show just exactly why astrology doesn’t work, you run the risk of being tarred and feathered.

Luckily, I’m willing to take that risk, and I’ll say it here, unequivocally and without hesitation: astrology doesn’t work. It’s hooey, hogwash, and balderdash.

Astrology lacks any sort of self-consistency in its history and in its implementation. There is no connection between what it predicts and why it predicts it, and, indeed, it appears to have added all sorts of random ideas to its ideology over the years without any sort of test of the accuracy of these ideas.

Science is the exact opposite of this. Scientists look for causes and use them to make specific predictions about future events. If the theory fails, it either gets modified and retested or it gets junked. I’ll note that science has been spectacularly successful in helping us understand our universe, and that it is perhaps the most successful endeavor undertaken by humans. Science works.

Astrology, on the other hand, doesn’t. It makes vague predictions that can always be adapted after the fact to fit observations, as we’ll see. Astrologers don’t seek causes at all, for a good reason: There isn’t any cause to astrology. If you look for some underlying reason, some connection between the stars and planets and our lives, you won’t find any. For astrology to sell, buyers must not seek out the fundamental principles behind it, because if they do they’ll see that there is none.

To avoid making testable claims about the driving forces of astrology, astrologers rely on mumbo-jumbo to bamboozle the public. If in the rare case they actually resort to specific arguments to defend astrology, they frequently use misleading terms. One web site (www.astrology.com) defines the basic force behind astrology by stating:

In some ways, the forces between the Planets involved in Astrology can be simplified into one word: gravity. The Sun has the greatest gravity and the strongest effect in Astrology, followed by the Moon, the Earth’s satellite. The other Planets are not truly satellites of the Earth, but nevertheless, they have gravity and so affect the Earth. The Sun controls the Earth’s motion and the Moon controls its tides, but the other Planets have their own effects on the Earth — and on the people who live on Earth. Sometimes their influences can be so strong that they outweigh the Sun’s energy!

But this makes no sense at all. If gravity is the dominant force, why doesn’t it matter if Mars is on the same side of the Sun as the Earth when you are born, or the opposite side? Mars’ gravitational influence on the Earth drops by a factor of more than 50 from one side of the Sun to the other. One would think this would be an incredibly important detail, yet it is ignored in most horoscopes.

It’s also easy to show that the Moon has a gravitational effect on the Earth (and you) that is more than 50 times the combined gravity of the planets. It seems to me that if gravity were the overriding factor in astrology, the Moon would influence us 50 times more than do the planets.

Astrology apologists sometimes look to other forces like electromagnetism. That’s an even worse choice than gravity, since the Sun’s effect on us is millions of times that of any other object in the sky. The Sun’s solar wind of charged particles is what causes aurorae, and a strong electromagnetic outburst from the Sun can trigger electricity blackouts and even damage satellites. This is a genuine physical effect and will have far more influence on your day than any horoscope.

Astrologers must then rely on some force that is not like gravity or electromagnetism. Some claim this force does not decrease with distance, thus sidestepping the problem of the planets’ true distance when you are born. But this opens up a new can of worms: as I write this, more than 70 planets have been discovered orbiting other stars. If the force behind astrology does not decrease with distance, what do we make of those planets? How do they affect my horoscope? And there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Galaxy alone. If they have as much force as, say, Jupiter and Mars, how can anyone possibly cast an accurate horoscope?

Not to mention other bodies in our own solar system. The discovery of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto threw astrologers into a fit for a while, but they were able to subsume these planets into their philosophy. Interestingly, one web site even mentions the four biggest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Juno. These are named after female gods, and the web site gives them feminine attributes after the goddesses for which they are named. Ceres, for example, was the goddess of fertility and the harvest, and astrologically (so claims the web site) has power over a woman’s procreative cycle.

But Ceres was discovered in 1801 and named by its discoverer, Giuseppe Piazzi, who happened to choose a