Intro To Planetary Hours

OK! We are getting started. As we know, there are 24 hours/day - appoximately 12 in the daytime and about 12 at night. Well, conveniently, we have 12 planetary hours during the daytime and 12 at night. However, there are only 7 "planets" we are dealing with. These are: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Of these, 5 are true planets (Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn). The Sun is a star and the moon is a satellite of our home planet earth. It is interesting that each of these planets rules one of the days of the week. So, the Sun rule "Sun"day; the Moon "Mon"day; Mars Tuesday ("Mar"di in French); Mercury Wednesday ("Mercre"di in French); Jupiter Thursday ("Jeu"di in French); Venus Friday ("Ven"dredi in French); while Saturn rule - you guessed it! - "Satur"day. Interesting facts which show that these planets were recognized VERY long ago for their effects on the days of the week. Comming back to our hours, to put it very simply, the hours and minutes of the day are divided into twelve equal parts and these are the day hours; and the same is for the night hours. This means that during summer, when the days are longer, we have day planetary hours longer than 60 minutes, and night hours shorter than 60 minutes. Of course this is reversed during the winter. Of coure the plantary hour is exactly 60 minutes when the day hours are equal to the night hours and both equal 12 hours. This happens during the spring equinox and the autumn equinox. These are the days when we move from winter to spring and from summer to autumn respectively.

So, let;s have a look at Sunday. The first hour is definitely Sun. This is followed, not by Moon, but by Venus, then Mercury, then Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and we are back at the eighth hour with the sun to repeat the cycle again. THAT IS ALL! If you follow the cycle(Sun-Venus-Mercury-Moon-Saturn-Jupiter-Mars), you move to the first night hour (the 13th hour from Sun) and we get Jupiter as the first night hour Sunday night and the last hour Sunday night (the 24th from Sun and the 12th from Jupiter) and we get Mercury. The hour after that is the first hour of monday. so what comes in the cycle after mercury? Moon of course, which is also the ruler of Monday. Was that difficult? Try experimenting with that and follow the cycle, You will find that at the beginning of the next week, we start again with Sun hour on Sunday!
Just one last thing: To find out which planetary hour you are in right now, if you are in daytime, you need to find out the time for Sun Rise and for Sunset. Then you divide the difference between them by 12. So you get a number of hours which can be 0 or 1 and a number of minutes from 0-59: this is the length of th eday hour. Then, you subtract sunrise from the current time. You then divide by the length of the day hour and add one to the result: this is the number of the hour. From the ruler of the day, you just follow the cycle until you get the hour you are in. At night, the process is basically the same, except that you use the sunset in place of sunrise and the following day's sunrise instead of the sunset. From these figures you get the length of the night hour. Then when you get the hour number as above, you count starting from the "night ruler" or the first night hour, which is also the 13th hour from the ruler of the day.
To make it easier, here are the rulers of the day and the night:

Day Day Ruler Night Ruler
Sunday Sun Jupiter
Monday Moon Venus
Tuesday Mars Saturn
Wednesday Mercury Sun
Thursday Jupiter Moon
Friday Venus Mars
Saturday Saturn Mercury

Next, we will be exploring some of the attributes related to each of the planetary hours. Have fun and stay cool!