Talk Of A New Zodiac Sign Has Some Taking A Second Look At The Charts

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Talk of a new Zodiac sign has some people buzzing.

It would mean a shift for everyone, so if today is your birthday, your old sign was Libra, and your new sign would be Virgo.

As CBS2's Elsie Finch reported, articles and websites have been popping up with a 13th Zodiac sign called Ophiuchus.

It's named after the constellation that depicts a serpent bearer.

The addition of a 13th sign means the start and end dates for all other signs would shift by nearly three weeks.

William Jones told CBS2's Finch that he's a Sagittarius, but would become an Ophiuchus.

"It would be interesting because it's a new dynamic. Do you think my personality would retroactively change?" he wondered.

Astrologers said talk of a 13th sign pops up every few years. This time an internet post on NASA's Space Place website got things started.

The post, written for children, referenced how the ancient Babylonians used twelve constellations to devise a Zodiac chart ignoring their own calculations that said the sun actually moves through 13 constellations.

The NASA post also pointed out that 3,000 years later the sky has shifted because Earth's axis doesn't point in quite the same direction, meaning the hard and fast start and end dates used to determine Zodiac signs aren't entirely accurate anymore.

Some astrologers took that to mean NASA was updating the Zodiac chart.

"It's not like bad, it's just, whoa everything I believed for so long was wrong," one person said.

A well respected astrologer said there's no reason for people to check the horoscope of their new sign. She said the western Zodiac chart that we follow is a fixed one. It doesn't take into account additional constellations of positional changes of Earth's axis.

"We choose to use this in the western system because it's a small amount of distance that the ecliptic shifts over the course of thousands of years," Deb McBride said, "It doesn't really change much in a lifetime."

McBride said Ophiuchus, like a host of other small constellations with faint stars, will continue to be ignored, and that our Zodiac chart isn't likely to change.

NASA's Space Place website makes it very clear that their scientists study astronomy not astrology. NASA has nothing to do with determining or changing Zodiac charts.