Tag Archives: free software

Astrology with Free Software | Valens is the Best Morinus Yet

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Why Free Software?

I rely on free and open source software options as much as possible in my work.  Free software has a very beneficial and democratizing effect on the practice of astrology.  I prefer free software for the site because it allows readers of any income level to replicate my charts and tables. Furthermore, there is a wealth of free birth data online, particularly on Astrodatabank.  Access to free software allows for easy chart-calculation to test out techniques against a wider range of data than I can present in an article.

What is Morinus?

As readers of the blog will know, my favorite free software program is Morinus. I have used the Traditional Morinus for the examples in almost all blog posts, and I’ve discussed using it in previous posts in this series.

Morinus is not just free astrology software, it is great astrology software. It will allow you to do many things that even some of the more costly programs won’t do. For instance, I can have a wheel in which the terms of the signs, the 7 hermetic lots of Paulus Alexandrinus, and the twelfth-parts of the planets are all immediately visible. I also have quick access to primary directions and zodiacal releasing information.

Importantly, Morinus is open source, so it is truly “the community’s software”. Members of the community with coding experience are free to check out the source code and adapt it to meet their needs. They can develop their own “versions” of the program which expand upon it.  In this sense, the developers (thanks Robert!) have given the astrological community a truly valuable gift. We’d be fools to pass it up for commercial products with less community potential.

Check out this post for more information on Morinus and free software in general, and this post on how to calculate primary directions with Morinus.

Valens

Over a year ago, in early 2014, a new version of Morinus emerged specifically tailored to Hellenistic astrology.  It is called “Valens“, after the 2nd-century Hellenistic astrologer Vettius Valens. Valens was inspired by Chris Brennan’s course on Hellenistic astrology, in which some of Valens’ timing techniques, especially Zodiacal Releasing, figure prominently.  In addition to the inclusion of Zodiacal Releasing, this version of Morinus also features the ability to easily insert the prenatal syzygy, the 7 hermetic lots (a lot for each planet as discussed by Paulus Alexandrinus and sourced from an early text attributed to Hermes), and the twelfth-parts of the planets into the chart.

After trying out the software, I firmly believe it is the best yet for Hellenistic techniques, and will serve readers well as they read the posts on this blog.

You can download the software here (for Windows scroll to the bottom of the page and download the Valensexe.zip).  Follow the installation instructions that you find on that page, as there is one additional step after you unzip the zip file (you will need to install the “Valens” font, located in the “Res” folder, by double-clicking it, or the chart will have letters in place of symbols).

A Few Optimizations

If you want your charts to look like the ones on this blog, here are a few tips. Before you’re begin, hold SHIFT and press U, so that your options will be saved automatically.

First, right click on the chart and choose “B&W” to make your chart black and white. I prefer the clean look of a black and white chart. Of course, this is a personal preference that does not impact practice. Unfortunately, Valens does not save the color setting so it may revert back to color when you reopen.

Secondly, you’ll want to set the Moon’s node to the “true node”, which you can do by holding the SHIFT key and pressing ‘W’.

Thirdly, get rid of any quadrant divisions if there are any by holding SHIFT and pressing F1.

Finally, let’s go into the appearance options (Appearance from the Options menu or hold SHIFT and press ‘A’).  For typical use, I would set my appearance options as shown in the table below, as I do like to see the two main Hellenistic lots (Fortune/Moon and Spirit/Sun – click for more information on the Hellenistic lots) as well as the prenatal syzygy, and the twelfth-parts (click for more information about the twelfth-parts). I don’t use the hermetic lots of the planets all that much so I leave them unchecked. I also find the round chart more intuitive and easy to read, so I choose that over the square (Hellenistic) chart.

You should end up with a chart that resembles the one below:

A Few Bugs to Work Out

As of this writing, Valens still lacks a few of the features that are found in traditional Morinus. For instance, you cannot save a chart and instead must manually use screen-capturing software (or the PrtScn button). Ideally, this should be fixed in the near future.

As I use both Morinus and Valens, an optimal solution would be to port the extra Hellenistic astrology features found in Valens into the generally more feature-rich Morinus. In this way, we can just enjoy (and the programmers can just maintain) one program that does everything we need. However, I’m not a programmer and both programs are free so I really can’t complain. For now, I’ll just keep using both Morinus and Valens together.

More Information

For more information on how to use Valens, please see the documentation on the site for the software. Additionally, check out the other articles on this site which explore specific techniques, such as lots and primary directions.

I hope you’ll start turning to the Valens program as the first one that you use to pull up charts. Please spread the word!

Astrology with Free Software | 1. Best Options

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Free Software Can be Better Software

You don’t need expensive astrology software to do great astrology. In fact, expensive astrology programs are often loaded with various interpretive modules and default settings that make it harder to think for yourself. Some of these out-of-the-box setting turn the program into a bad astrologer, rather than a tool to help astrologers find the information they need.

I think that charting should be done with free software if adequate programs are available. It is even better if the software is open-source. Open-source software has freely available source code allowing astrologer-programmers to improve the program to their heart’s content. This type of free modifiable software is truly the software of the community, as it can be adjusted to fit the needs of particular astrological practices.

Morinus

I particularly advocate the use of Morinus, a free open-source astrology program with a plethora of settings. Morinus has the ability to do accurate primary directions. It also has different varieties, including a traditional version that cuts out some of the clutter.  It is written in Python, which is itself a very popular open-source programming language. Python is so powerful and intuitive that it is the programming language used by NASA, CERN, Google, Yahoo!, and other big names.  Nearly always, the charts on my blog will be from Morinus.

There is sometimes a slight learning curve with initial chart entry, compared with other programs, but they are continuously improving in this area.  I’ve addressed installation and chart entry in a past article, which I urge the reader to check out.

A Morinus Chart: Marvin Gaye’s Natal Chart w/twelfth-parts

Astro-Databank

Additionally, I advocate the use of Astro-Databank for researching celebrity chart data. Astro-databank provides the birth data for tens of thousands of celebrities and notable persons. It also has the times and charts for many significant events. You can even quickly view a chart for the data, albeit with modern chart features. You are free to copy birth data into an astrological program like Morinus to see a traditional chart information.

On Astro-Databank, be careful of using anything that doesn’t have a Rodden Rating of A or AA (at least B). Furthermore, understand that the ratings are a bit subjective, so check the source notes. For instance, James Randi’s birth data came from James Randi who was quoting his birth certificate. It is still given a C, rather than an AA, because the people writing the entry just don’t want to believe him.

In conclusion, I advocate the use of Astro-Databank, but I caution against uncritically taking the rating and chart data at face value without reviewing source notes.  In the next post in this series, I will show how to use Astr0-Databank as an aid for building up a chart database in Morinus.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s HORIZONS Interface

The HORIZONS web-interface is a generous offering by NASA.  This is a great resource for generating ephemerides.  It is of particular value to astrologers who use asteroids, but of less value to traditional astrologers.  The reason it is so great for asteroid astrologers is that pretty much every asteroid with an identifying number and/or name can be found. Additionally, you can see the asteroid’s orbital dynamics and even generate ephemeride tables. These tables make it easy to find a planet or asteroid’s position on any given day and to pinpoint times of stationing.

Be sure to change the “Table Settings” such that #31 is checked, so that the table gives the Observational Ecliptic Longitude and Latitude of the planet.  The observational ecliptic longitude is the position in the zodiac. A position of 270.5* is 270 degrees past 0 Aries, which is 270/30 signs into the zodiac. It has exactly traversed 9 signs already (1. Aries, 2. Taurus, 3. Gemini, 4. Cancer, 5. Leo, 6. Virgo, 7. Libra, 8. Scorpio, 9. Sagittarius), so it is at 0 degrees Capricorn, plus 1/2 a degree. Therefore, the position would be 0*30′ Capricorn.  I won’t be working with this interface much on this site, but it can be very fun, particularly for those that work with asteroid.

Fun with Asteroids

As an exercise, try to find where asteroid Linux is today (9* Capricorn at the time of this writing). Next, try to find the degree of its last 1st (i.e. direct) station by changing the time settings to encompass a much larger past period and finding the day when longitude switches from descending to ascending (July 21, 2011 at 4* Sagittarius prior to this article).

One day, I spent hours installing Linux operating systems on about a half dozen computers for friends and family. I got a real kick finding out that asteroid Linux was conjunct my MC within a degree the whole day.  Now go find out where asteroid 911 Agamemnon was on 9/11/2001.  And where was the Sun on that day?  Yes, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your traditional astrology – but you’ll find the traditional astrology (at least the Hellenistic and Persian varieties) most useful for prediction – trust me on this!

Astro.com

In addition to offering some of the worst new age chart interpretation packages available, Astro.com also offers a very cool online chart calculator and chart drawing module. You can also store a short database of charts on their website for easy retrieval from anywhere with internet access.  I’ll address this at greater length in a future post on calculating and storing charts with their online software.

Another awesome resource on their site is the section with free ephemerides for 6,000 years.  Every astrologer should print (or even buy) an ephemeris. It makes it easy to scan and track the planets, to observe when stations, eclipses, important aspects, and other such stuff occurs.  Astro.com is also the host for Astro-Databank. Their contribution to providing free astrological resources to astrologers is a great one, for which I’m very thankful..

Others

Those above are just my most highly recommended free charting resources.  There are many additional free resources out there for astrologers.  The comments area is a great place to help draw awareness to other free resources that are out there.  Thanks!

Featured image of an Apple II computer is in the public domain.