Max. declinations of planets?

1
I?m new to the forum and enjoying my exploration of this site. I hope this is the right area for me to place this question.

I?m looking for information on the max. declination north and south of each planet. How far can they go from the equator? Does anyone know if the info is out there somewhere in a table? If so please point me in the right direction because I am getting lost in the astronomy sites! Im planning to do a study of planetary affect at time of max decl. Also v. interested if anyone has views or experiences about the affect of declination on planets.

Thanks
J.

2
Here's an online ephemeris which includes declinations http://www.ephemeris.com/ . Here you can search around a bit, filling in some dates.

As a simple rule of fist the maximum declinations are about when the planets are close to 0?Cancer and the minimum declinations are there when close to 0? Capricorn. So just like the Sun, but watch out. When a planet has a big inclination (towards the ecliptic) like Pluto (17?) the differences can be huge. Around 1914 Pluto was just entering Cancer but had a declination of just +18?. only to reach maximum of less than +24? some 30 years later, while Pluto was in 10 Leo.

This is an exception though, the other planets are not so extreme. Note that the maxima (minima) can be lower (higher) than the Sun's declination like the Moon's of the 18.6 year cycle. Just compare the Moon's 0? Cancer positions of 2006 for example with those of 1997.

This is related to the movements of the Lunar Nodes. The planets have their nodes too but these nodes move much slower. In many centuries Pluto's node will have moved so that when he is in 0? Cancer the declination will be about +40?, and therefore above the horizon all night for latitudes like London and more north of it.

3
Thank you Eddy!
I've done quite a lot of ephemeris searching though and that don?t tell me for sure what the maximum declinations should be. I want to know if there exists a known table saying something like: max declination of Mars is 36 N and 56 S
or whatever.
I thought it would be easy to find this information but it seems not

Thanks for answering
J.

4
Hi Julian,

Unfortunately it's not that easy as it looks like at first sight. Since the planets orbit the Sun, their distance to the Earth is always different. When a planet is close, like Mars in opposition with the Sun, then any deviation is much larger than when furthest from Earth (around conjunction with the Sun).

Here I found something on planets 'out of bounds' when the declination of Moon/planet is further than the Sun ever can be. A list of Mars' out of bounds is there. Perhaps this could be useful.
http://www.sfaa.us/images/BrockPlanetar ... ations.pdf

Here's another list of planets 'out of bounds' 2009-2013
http://www.astrologyweekly.com/astrolog ... bounds.php
There must be more to be found when you google for this term.

Other lists with the extreme declinations will give just a few per century I believe, just like the Guinnes book of records mentions the extremes.

Here's something where you can find min max declinations of planets during a certain year between 1885 and 2105, still a bit elaborate job, but you can find the data faster with "Ctrl f" and then search for "+d" or "-d".
http://www.astro.uu.nl/~strous/AA/en/ve ... len.html#3

So what you can do is estimate a year, using an ephemeris, when the maximum/minimum declination will take place, or find the out of bound periods on the web, and then refine it with the lists in the website just mentioned.

This appears to be a very interesting site with more data like the moment of greatest elongations, passages through nodes of planets etc.
which aren't usually found in astrological ephemerides.