After moving to a house in rural Central Texas in 1980, I fell in love with the blackness of the sky. Our first night, we had no electricity. There were no street lights. It must have been near new moon - I don't remember the moon in view. Just an amazing darkness sprayed with thousands of stars, points of bright light from varied distances afar. The air was crisp and clean and scented with cedar. What good fortune.

At that time, very much the amateur, I could easily identify only two constellations - the Big Dipper and Orion. Living where the sky opened so beautifully, over the years on clear nights, I gradually learned a number more.

The zodiac consists of 12 constellations along the ecliptic, the same circular path as the sun, one for each month of the year: Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagitarius, and Capricorn.  From our perspective on earth, they are lined up in the sky and during the course of each year, one after the other, month after month, processing west, they catch up to the sun and gradually reappear in the east, visible once again just before sunrise. The wobble of the earth on its axis can affect our view of the path of the constellations, meaning if events such as major earthquakes or volcanoes shift the tilt of our planet, that zodiacal path - and the pattern of the stars within each constellation - can change. I believe there has been evidence, and observational documentation by ancient astrologers, suggesting such change has happened in millenia past (and possibly more recent times as well).

All those years, 1980 to 2006, I only easily recognized (meaning, without a guidebook) three of the constellations of the zodiac: Scorpio and Sagittarius, the scorpion and the archer (or teapot), bold and cheerful in the summer sky, and Gemini, the twins, a pair of brilliant stars (Castor and Pollux), not physically close to each other in space, but appearing visibly close to each other from our perspective on earth.