Latitude Longitude From Google Maps

In astrology work, we need accurate latitudes and longitudes, preferably expressed in sexagesimal degrees rather than decimal degrees and, sometimes, good to a few seconds.
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In those instances where the Astrodienst Atlas Query on astro.com is insufficient, there's a way to use Google maps to find this precise information. Below are 10 step-by-step instructions with pictures on how to do that. If you are careful and follow these precisely, I guarantee you can find the location of any little house or piece of rock in the world. The accuracy of Google is probably not to one second of arc, owing to the projection limitations of such photographs, but it's close enough to the real coordinates to have you build your astrology chart with the most precise Ascendant and Midheaven.

Let's say you want to pinpoint the exact location of your computer desk, in your office building, so that you can do even more precise horary astrology.

Let's say you work at the Oval Office in the White House in Washington DC

1. Open Google Maps
2. Search for Oval Office
3. Zoom in to get a close view of the House and locate your office and computer desk
4. At the top right-hand corner of the screen, click on "Link"
5. Copy and paste the link in a text editor
6. Take out all the gibberish except the last figures in the link. They correspond to the approximate latitude and longitude of your office
7. Copy these figures in your clipboard
8. Paste these figures in the Google Maps search box (as if you were looking again for this place). You'll obtain the sexagesimal degrees of latitude and longitude of a place very near the Oval Office.
9. Zoom in to obtain a good view of the roof of your office building
10. Tweak the figures in the Google search box until you get the exact location of your computer on your desk in the Oval Office in the White House in Washington
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Horoscope Astrology of Kepler Mission Spacecraft Launch

For those practitioners of Horary Astrology, I thought there would be fun in looking at this interesting question by a CBS news article:

"Kepler Asks: Are Other Earths Out There?"

"There's a lot of desire in the science community to understand extra-terrestrial planets, not just find them," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science. "We've already found 300 or so, mostly from the ground. But now we're entering the stage of going beyond just proving that they exist. It's how many are out there, and perhaps the most important question of all, are there any 'Earths' out there?"

Looking at the source code of this article, it looks like it was created on March 7, 2009 at 12h08m27s and published on March 7, 2009 at 12h46m18s. Location for this article is almost near impossible to define, so I would probably use the location of CBS headquarters in New York (NY, USA) which, according to Google is: +40° 45' 38", -73° 58' 41".

The full press kit published by NASA on the Kepler mission can be found here, with lots of interesting details, graphs and photos. The NASA site for Kepler, with all of the information about this mission, with videos, etc. is here.

For future reference, I found a list of the latitudes and longitudes of all launch pads of aerospace missions, with maps and historical data. It's called Astronautix and the list is here. The main site has much useful information on aeronautics and space adventures, as well as many latitudes and longitude coordinates, including for missile launches. When using such coordinates, be aware they are given in decimal degrees, not sexagesimal degrees. Depending on which software you use, you may need to convert from decimal degrees to sexagesimal degrees. The site of MarineWayPoints has a calculator to do this; it also has a great circle calculator to find out the distance between two latitudes and longitudes.

Below are the charts of the question, as well as charts of the Kepler launch and separation. Since the first return of data from Kepler is expected in about 3.5 years' time, it might also be interesting to progress the charts in an attempt to answer the question.

First and second charts for the creation of the article (the creation of the question when it first arose in the mind of the querent) and for the publishing of the article (the question becomes public).

Note that the MC for the publication of the article is very late in Pisces and that a difference either in an inaccurate timing (6 minutes) and/or in latitude/longitude (2 degrees) would place the MC at 0° Aries, which would be quite fitting for such a question. Ruler of VIIth is cadent and retrograde regardless of the time/coordinates. 

And here are the astrological charts for the launch of the Kepler Spacecraft and its separation.

I was unable to give a geographical location for the separation, as the spacecraft travels so fast it's impossible to pinpoint over which earth location this happened. From reading the articles in the press, it seems this happened over Australia or Western Pacific. Considering that the spacecraft birth was afterall at the launch pad, I used the pad's coordinates. If one of the astrologers reading me has the Astro*Carto*Graphy software, perhaps they could try and see what is revealed in the ACG graphs and help with location.

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