Computers have revolutionised astrology. Many people are put off astrology by the idea that it’s highly complex and involves lots of difficult mathematics. It needn’t, and chart calculation is not as bad as it sounds, but astrology books going into immense detail about such arcane things as sidereal time, time zone adjustments, accelerations on the interval and then delving into logarithms simply to calculate someone’s rising sign is enough to put the hardiest soul off astrology for ever!

Then, suddenly, astrology calculations became entirely trivial. No longer do you need to carry around an ephemeris, a table of houses, an atlas, a book full of time zone changes and spend mind-boggling hours adding up (or was it subtracting?) numbers. To calculate a chart, all you need to know is the date, time and place of birth - and a computer.

If you’re reading this website then you presumably have access to a computer, so I’m going to give you a quick guided tour of the wonderful things you can do with a computer, and - I hope - show you how you can now do astrology that would have been virtually impossible a decade ago.

THE BASICS - PRODUCING A CHART

Chart calculation used to be a minefield, even for a professional astrologer. It wasn’t just the maths that made things awkward - for instance, I had to do a chart for a man born in a small town in Ontario, Canada, on 26 September 1953. He knew his birth time, and knew that Ontario is on “Eastern Standard Time”, the same as New York. However - did they have “Daylight Saving Time” (the equivalent of our British Summer Time) in Ontario in 1953, and if so, was it in operation on 26 September? Unsurprisingly, he didn’t know. Can you give me the exact dates that British Summer Time applied the year you were born? I thought not!

To make matters worse, it turned out that Ontario did not have a standard rule in those days, and it was up to individual cities whether to adopt the national guidelines on Daylight Saving Time.

Hands up anyone who knows the latitude and longitude of Toronto off the top of their head?

It took a lot of digging before I found out the answer to my question - which came courtesy of somebody pointing me to the excellent Astrodienst site. This website - which is free - allows you to produce a chart in a matter of a minute or two, and it has a huge database built into it containing latitudes, longitudes, time zones and summertime changes. All you need to know is the name of the town, the country, the date and the time and a minute or two later you have a nice colourful chart on your screen. Now that’s got to be easier than using logarithms!

To see step-by-step instructions on how to use this site, read this article on my website.

If you do a lot of charts, you may find it useful to have an astrology program on your computer. This allows you to do a lot more than simply print out a chart - most will allow you to do transits, harmonics, progressions and a whole host of other functions; the downside is that most commercial astrology programs are quite expensive. However, there is one program which is totally free called Astrolog. It’s quite easy to use once you’ve got used to it, but it isn’t trivial to set up to begin with - if you just download it and run it, it looks odd. No nice graphics wheels, just a screen full of fairly meaningless text. Once you’ve got it set up properly, though, it looks very nice; the wheel looks nicer than most commercial programs in my opinion. Astrolog is “freeware” which means the software is not only free of charge, but it means that other programmers can come along and enhance it as well, provided they don’t charge for it. By and large, astrologers are a friendly, socially-minded bunch, and we’re lucky to have an excellent programmer in our ranks called António Ramos, who has made some major improvements to the original Astrolog program. If you have a PC running Windows, I would recommend using the new version of Astrolog, called Astrolog32.

To see step-by-step instruction on downloading and installing Astrolog32, read this article on my website.

ASTEROIDS AND CENTAURS

If you’ve been scanning through this website, you’ll see we have a lot of articles about asteroids and centaurs - two of our teachers are engaged in research into the centaurs, so it features quite a lot on this site! Until recently, finding out where a particular asteroid or centaur was in your natal chart presented a problem. Various astrologers have been extremely helpful in providing ephemerides for these bodies, and the Links section gives a number of these sites. However, the real experts in this matter are NASA - they need to know where pretty much every lump of rock in our solar system is, so as soon as something new is discovered, NASA have an ephemeris for it pretty quickly.

The asteroid belt contains a vast number of asteroids - probably the remnants of a former planet - so buying a book containing positions for every asteroid simply isn’t feasible. Now, there’s probably an asteroid out there with your name on it - whether it means anything astrologically is a matter of debate, of course, but it might be interesting to see where it is in your chart. This would have been practically impossible a few years ago, but now - thanks to NASA - you can find out.

It has to be said that NASA aren’t in business to provide services to astrologers. In fact, most scientists don’t really hold with astrology, and can be quite hostile, so NASA don’t make it easy for us. They don’t provide a simple ephemeris that tells us that asteroid Eros is going to be at 18 Sagittarius 25, for instance - but what they do provide is an online ephemeris that will tell us the information we want, but they disguise it rather well hoping it will put us off. Well, it needn’t - if you want to find out where that asteroid with your name on it is in your natal chart, read this article to find out how.

OTHER RESOURCES

It doesn’t matter how obscure your specialist area in astrology is - there is bound to be a website out there somewhere dealing with it! The Internet has made finding this kind of information extremely easy - just type your interest into any search engine (www.google.com is the most popular), and you’ll find plenty of information. Harmonics? Astrocartography? What on earth is the Part of Hyleg? Google knows!

AN ASTROLOGICAL COMMUNITY

A logical extension to websites on the Internet is the creation of an online community of astrologers. There are now numerous astrology on-line groups, where people share ideas and experiences and even meet in real life from time to time. The biggest on-line group is called Conjunction, but there are many others too. Take a look at the Links page on this site for some examples.

The important thing to remember is that YOU can be part of the growing astrological community, whether you’re a beginner or an expert. If you want to find out more about astrology, make use of all the fabulous tools at our disposal now - join a local astrology group, take an astrology class, and join in the online astrological community. You’ll find a genuinely warm welcome!

Chris Mitchell.