Tonight's astronomy lab dealt with daily, yearly, and long-term motions on the sky. The precession of the Earth on its axis causes the stars to change their locations relative to the time of year with a 26,000 year cycle. Anyways...to demonstrate that, we have the students look up their "sun sign", the constellation that the Sun is in on the day you were born.

Because the common astrological signs were developed 2000 years ago, most people are not the "sign" that they read in the newspaper. I've had occasions in class where young women have burst into tears when discovering that they weren't Virgos. However, I never heard a student squeal with quite the anger that I heard tonight. She was wearing a tank top which very prominently showed a scorpion on her right shoulder. Then she muttered, "There's always laser removal."

Sometimes my job has unexpected perks. :)