"Good evening." "As of for the moment, one of the most prominent constellations visible in the night sky is Leo, the lion." "And if the skies happen to be clear, if you go out after this program, and look up in the south, fairly high, there you will see the lion." "And we've got a model of it here, in the studio, you may be able to recognise that curved line of stars, which we call the sickle, and here's the brightest star of the constellation, Regulus, the royal star." "And over here there are three more stars making up a kind of triangle." "Leo is always very prominent." "But at the present moment, it's made even more so by the presence there of a right planet, Mars, which is in just about there." "And we can say then that Mars is in the constellation of Leo." "Well, Mars is receding from the earth at the moment, it's going further away every day, but at the present moment as you know there are two rockets on their way there, and I did say that I'd tell you more about them" "when I came back this month." "In point of fact, there's really very little I can say." "So far as we know, both the rockets, the American Mariner 4 and the Russian Zond 2, are keeping well on course, and they're still in touch, and they may send back some interesting information, about next July." "But for the moment, it's just everything going according to plan." "Now, saying that Mars is in Leo is really not quite correct." "Let's have a look at the position of Mars against the stars of Leo." "There is Regulus, there is Mars, and close to Mars, you can see the much more distant planet Uranus." "Not properly visible without a telescope," "I'll have more to say about that a little bit later on." "But Mars then again is a planet, going round the sun." "And it's very much closer to us than any of the stars." "Therefore it's a mere line of sightening." "We're seeing Mars against the background of stars that makes up the lion." "But what is more important still, is that a constellation is not really a constellation at all." "And the stars in Leo are totally unconnected with each other." "They simply happen to be seen in much the same direction as observed from the earth." "Now I think this model will show what I mean." "Here, remember is Regulus, the royal star, the brightest one in the constellation, and here is the star Epsilon Leonis, which also forms part of the characteristic sickle curve." "I'd like you to imagine that you, watching your screen, are in the position of the earth, looking at this particular constellation." "In fact, Regulus is much closer to us than Epsilon leonis, and we are a great deal nearer to this star than to this one." "If we could move, and look at the constellation Leo from somewhere else in the universe, it would no longer look like the cat that we see." "And I think I can produce that effect by rotating this cur table on which we got the stars mounted." "Like this." "And as I move it, you will see that the characteristic shape disappears completely." "Now there is Regulus again, there is Epsilon Leonis, and as you can see they're a long way apart, in fact, more than 300 lightyears." "As we turn the table round, giving the impression that we're observing from different directions in space, you will very gradually, I think, see the pattern reform." "But this shows straightaway that the stars in Leo are totally unconnected with each other." "It's a mere line of sight effect." "You see the pattern reform in a minute or so." "Not too easy to judge because the stars are so comparatively far away from each other." "I'm sorry that by waving about it looks rather like four stars but you can see the kind of effect that I made." "So if you, if the sun happened to lie there, in the middle of this area, then some of the stars over here would lie on one side of the sky, and other stars would lie in the opposite part of the sky." "So a constellation is merely made up of totally disconnected stars." "And this star has no more to do with this star, than the sun has." "And yet it is by this kind of alignment that the so-called science of astrology is based." "Now I've had a great many letters recently about astrology, because some people still mix it up with true astrology." "In fact, there's all the difference in the world." "Astronomy is a proper science." "Astrology, I think there's no doubt at all, is absolute nonsense from beginning to end." "And I say this with feeling, because not very many weeks ago there was a cutting in a Brighton evening paper that described me as an astrologer." "Well I can assure you that I am not," "I have no faith in astrology whatsoever." "Astrology purports to tell the fortunes and careers and characters of human beings by the positions of the stars against the constellation at the moment of birth." "And that is the basis of all astrological forecasting." "But as you can see the planets have nothing to do with the stars in fact, and the stars and the constellations have nothing to do with each other." "This doesn't seem very logical to start with." "Of course, all the old astronomers were also astrologers, they had to be." "And here is a picture of an old astronomer astrologer, who was in fact tried for sorcery, which was nothing uncommon in the middle ages." "But some of the great men were believers in astrology too." "For example, the brilliant mathematician Johan Keppler personally cast horoscopes, although whether he believed in them was quite another matter." "And another mystic was no less a person than the great sir Isaac Newton." "But sky lore of all kinds goes back a very long way indeed, almost to the start of human history I suppose." "And there are some very ancient buildings to prove it." "For example, the Egyptian pyramids are astronomically aligned without a doubt, there's no question about that at all." "And so are our own stone circles, such as Stonehenge, which let me repeat once again has absolutely nothing to do with the druids, it was there a long time before the druids were." "In more recent years there have been end of the world panics, which are entirely baseless." "Some of these are being based on comets." "Now I quite agree that a really brilliant comet must be a magnificent sight." "I can't give you any first-hand account unfortunately, because I've never seen a bright comet." "There hasn't been one since 1910." "But there were plenty of them during the last century, and one in particular, the comet of 1858, was said to be remarkably beautiful, with a long, curved tail." "The ancients believed that if a comet hit the earth, it could destroy the world, and there were serious panics on that score." "In fact, we now know that a comet is not a solid body, and even if a comet did hit the earth, it couldn't do more than cause local damage." "And on more than one occasion the earth has gone through a comet fail." "Incidentally I can't resist showing you a picture of a much more recent comet, not nearly such a splendid one, the Arend Roland comet of 1957, which was visible when we started off these sky at night programmes of ours," "and this picture was I think just about the first one I ever showed." "Of course, it wasn't comparable to the bright comets of the past, but it was easily visible with the naked eye." "Of all these old parts of sky lore, the only one that really survives today to any extent is astrology, which lingers on particularly in countries such as India." "We must remember of course that the ancients believed the earth to be the centre of the universe, and that I suppose was reasonable enough at the time." "Most of the old Greek astronomers believed that, and according to the Ptolemaic system, which was brought to perfection by the last great astronomer of ancient time, the earth lay in the middle of the universe, and round it went, in order, the moon," "two planets, Mercury and Venus, then the sun, and then the outer planets, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn." "And beyond them came the sphere of the fixed stars." "So they knew five planets, together with the sun and the moon, which they packed together to make the mystical number of seven, in the way that astrologers have." "But there are in fact some more planets beyond Saturn, about which the ancients knew nothing at all." "Let's have a look now at a plan of the solar system as we know it to be, with the sun in the middle, and Mercury, Venus," "Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn going round it." "And the asteroids or minor planets between Mars and Jupiter." "Beyond Saturn there are three more planets:" "Uranus, discovered in 1781, and there's a picture of Uranus, taken with the world's largest telescope, that ring of course is merely a photographic effect." "Beyond Uranus, Neptune, discovered in 1846," "Neptune is a giant planet, and then beyond Neptune comes Pluto, discovered as recently as 1930." "Well as I say, the ancients knew nothing about these planets." "Yet modern astronomers say first of all that the old astrological predictions were very good, and secondly that the ancients didn't know three of the planets by which they're meant to be making their predictions." "So I'd very much like to know why in this case the astrologers didn't crack down these planets by their influences, and tell the astronomers about them." "I don't think anyone has ever really answered that question." "Besides, there are various other bodies in the solar system too." "As I say, there are the asteroids or minor planets, which go round between the paths of Mars and Jupiter." "I quite agree they're pretty small." "The brightest of them is Vesta, and the diameter of Vesta is not so great as that of Great Britain." "But all the same, they are planets, there's no question about that at all." "I believe that a modern German school of astrology which is now making a forecast on the basis of there being four, five, or six more planets out beyond Pluto." "Well, all I can say is that I wish them luck." "But the real, absolute absurdity of astrology is, I think, demonstrated very easily by the fact that the planets, which are so close to us, are said to be effective when they are seen against the background" "of disconnected stars making up a constellation." "Let's have another look at our model of Leo, the lion." "And this is Leo as seen from the earth." "Now let's look at it from another direction." "And you will see straight away that the lion-like pattern disappears." "Now, let's have one more look at the pattern as it is seen from earth, with the sickle and the triangle." "Who made Leo into a lion?" "Well, the old stargazers did." "Nobody is quite certain who it was, it may have grown up gradually, but the old people looked at that pattern, and for some reason or other, I can't think why, they saw a lion there, and they made it into the lion constellation," "and they of course didn't know that the stars themselves were totally unconnected with each other." "So there is Leo the lion." "And having done that, the astrologers promptly assigned" "Leo lion characteristics to that particular group of stars, which, if you think about, it is a perfect way of arguing round in a circle." "Then consider the next constellation of the zodiac, which is cancer, the crabs." "Now the stars of cancer are like that, they are not very bright, it's a rather dim constellation." "Out of it, the old astrologers made a crab, like this." "And having done so, they promptly assigned to it watery characteristics, even though they had made the crab themselves, out of a pattern of stars which looks nothing like a crab or anything else." "Well, I can only say, as doctor Johnson did in a previous connection about something else, if you will believe that, you will believe anything." "So being scared, too, when planets are seen in the same part of the sky." "A few years ago, there was widespread panic, I think it was in India, when five planets happened to be in more or less the same region." "Tomorrow night, as I've said, Mars and Uranus are going to be close together in the constellation of Leo, the lion." "That bottom dark circle shows what you will see if you look at the area with a pair of low power binoculars." "Mars of course is very brilliant, and Uranus looks like a rather dim star, not really visible with the naked eye." "But tomorrow evening is a very good time to look for it, because Mars acts as a pointer for Uranus." "Up about you can see what the situation really is." "Mars is very much closer to us than Uranus, and merely happens to lie in the same direction." "When you ask astrologers just why the planet's positions are meant to influence human beings, they never have any answer at all." "They merely mutter things about ancient teachings with a capital A and a capital T, and then retire behind their beards." "And that just about sums it up I think." "They also say that their forecasts are accurate." "Well sometimes of course they are." "By the laws of chance it would be amazing if they weren't." "But it's nothing more than that." "For example, a little while ago, one astrological magazine forecast correctly the assassination of president Kennedy, and they were very proud of that." "Regardless of the fact that previously, they had forecast the assassination of general De Gaulle, and the deposition of president Franco." "So you see, you're bound to get correct forecasts sometimes, but it has nothing to do whatever with the positions of the planets and their orbits." "And whatever you do, even though astrology is pretty harmless, and modern astrologers, like flat earthers, are perfectly sincere people, don't confuse astrology, which is baseless rubbish, with astronomy, which is an exact science." "Now I can't end without saying something about the new Ranger pictures of the moon." "As you know, Ranger 9 has hit the moon, and it's sent back some magnificent photographs." "Here first of all is a photograph of the crater Alphonsus, seen from a height of just over 200 miles." "You can see it, that large crater over to the left-hand side." "Another picture of this area, taken from greater altitude, shows part of Alphonsus, over to the right this time, with some of those long cracks, or clefts." "The closer up pictures from Ranger 9 show what I've suspected for a long time, that these cracks aren't really clefts at all, they're long strings of little craters that all run together." "And this photograph is, I think, a particularly good one." "It certainly looks like a volcanic landscape to me." "And there's one very good picture, taken from a height of only three quarters of a mile above the moon's surface, and these are really remarkable, and the smallest craterlets shown on these Ranger 9 pictures" "are only about two and a half feet in diameter." "And a second or two after that picture was taken," "Ranger 9 hit the moon and destroyed itself." "Well this unquestionably has been a major triumph." "It marks the end of the Ranger series, and the next American step is to put a surveyor rocket down gently on the moon's surface, so that after landing, it can continue transmitting information to us." "Just when this is going to be done, well we don't know." "But it shouldn't, I think, be too long." "It's very dangerous now to make forecasts for more than a few weeks ahead, but I have no doubt that 1965 and 1966 are going to be very exciting years in the field of space research." "Goodnight."