I once knew someone who had to prepare the ‘Your Stars’ column for the local newspaper.

Conceptual picture I made of a red dwarf with large companion using my trusty Celestia installation.

It was a serious job that had to be got right. The content arrived from an external service (as a lot of newspaper content of this ilk does) but there was only a certain amount of space for the column, and so the daily grind involved shuffling, clipping and mixing the material until it fitted.

Nobody ever complained that their ‘stars’ were wrong.

Setting aside the point that this stuff started off as Babylonian positional astronomy, and the Earth’s precessed since then – which puts all the constellations out by one – my big question is how the astrologers are coping now Pluto’s been demoted. And how did they cope before 1930 when it wasn’t known? And what…