This episode explores the free chart software available from http://www.astro.com, and why this website is the #1 preferred astrological-resource website. I also discuss AstroWiki, Astro Databank (explaining what ‘RR’ means) and talk you through step-by-step, explaining how to create your natal chart using the advanced settings on AstroDienst.
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📍Links https://www.stelliumastrology.com/links/
➡️ View The Best Astrology Books for Beginners here
➡️ Read the Step-By-Step on How to Create a Free Account with Astro.com
➡️ Read about the Rodden Rating here
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome back to The Stellium Astrology Podcast. I am Stefanie James, and you’re listening to a podcast episode dedicated to teaching you how to generate your own natal chart and where you can access free astrology software.
So, the software that you can access to do this is on a website called AstroDienst, or as most of us call it http://www.astro.com (I will add a link in the description).
AstroDienst (which means astro-service) is unbeatable for its encyclopedic quantity of astrological information and data available. And the most incredible thing about this website is that it’s completely free to sign up with the capacity to store a hundred charts with a free account or up to 1000 charts, if you decide to subscribe! The subscription fee, the last time I checked was eight euros a year. So it’s a real steal actually!
Free Software
I would highly recommend that you go and immediately create an account with astro.com. Maybe perhaps, even while you’re listening to this episode. I can talk you through it and help you to understand exactly what to do.
And basically there are options on there. So you can cast natal (which is the birth chart) synastry (which is relationship charts). When you’ve got more than one chart that you want to put together composite charts, which is a type of synastry chart. And then there’s transits, progressions directions, asteroids, fixed stars, hypothetical points, Astro*carto*graphy, astro-mapping, and so much more!
There really is something for everyone. It’s an incredible tool. And in addition to all of that there’s also a 9,000 year Swiss ephemeris available to download. So you can download each year that you need special body of ephemeris files for comets and asteroids, Astro-Wiki which is a free encyclopedia of astrology, and Astro Data-Bank, which is the most trusted compendium of astrological chart data available on the internet. So I don’t know if my sales pitch has worked on you, but you, but it totally should have! Because for us to get all that stuff for free is totally crazy, but they’re doing it – so take advantage!
Networking at Conferences
So it’s kind of interesting because last summer I was at an astrology conference in the UK, the astrological association conference. And it was quite a dramatic conference for a number of reasons, but what was, this was the zero drama bit, which I enjoyed quite a bit, which was I think my first night that I arrived and I was hanging out with a few astrologers that I’ve met previous conferences and in India, there was a lady there that I’d met in India. So I was sitting with Nicola Smuts: Hi Nicola, if you’re listening! Shout out to Nicola of Fertility Astrology!
So I was sitting next to Nicola and we were talking away and I was sitting next to a gentleman who was drinking a glass of red wine and wearing a white suit. I was getting anxious because I was worried he was going to spill his red wine on his suit! It was after a little while of talking that I realized that it was Alois Treindl who is the founder and director of AstroDienst, the website I’m referring you to.
From a PhD to Astrology
He was born in Germany and he came to Zurich, Switzerland in 1976 as a research assistant in the physics department of the Swiss Federal Institute. He graduated from the Institute with a PhD in Physics in 1981. And during his graduate time, he started to be interested in various areas beyond the limits of conventional science. So things like humanistic psychology, states of altered consciousness, parapsychology, and also astrology, which he found really helped him to bring all of the fields that he’d learned about and put it under one roof.
So I just thought it was quite interesting because you don’t necessarily associate the fluffy pseudo-scientific (which unfortunately astrology does get lumped in with pseudo-science) area of astrology into – you just don’t normally associate people with PhDs in physics that going to be interested in astrology. Well, you’d be surprised there are so many and you know, it’s a very interesting, very amazing subject, which helps you explore yourself on such a great level.
A Gift From the Tech-Squad
So it’s really nice when you get somebody with such an academic background who has done so much for the field of astrology. It really is incredible. He’s obviously a computer programmer. So he’s created this amazing resource for people to use. Now I mentioned that you can have a hundred free accounts, or if you subscribe, you can have a thousand.
I did talk about Astro Data-Bank. Now Astro Data-Bank is great because it’s very trusted, because a lovely lady called Lois Rodden, who I believe was a very close friend to my mentor and the principal of the London School of Astrology and a great source of inspiration to me – Frank Clifford. So, Lois Rodden created a rating system of charts with an ‘A’ or ‘D’ a ‘AA’, which is really, really trusted.
How Accurate is Your Birth Time?
So AA would be where the chart has got the birth time on the birth certificate, (which doesn’t always happen in England). I think they do it in Scotland, but there were some disputes over how accurate even that would be. But you know, if you’ve got your birth time – I happened to get mine from my medical records, which I got from my doctor which by the way, if you’d like to claim your medical records, all you have to do is put in a Subject Access Request.
It’s a legal requirement now due to General Data Protection Regulation in the UK, which is the GDPR. If you’ve not heard of it before, and you can get your medical records sent through to you, however, it’s not really likely that your medical records are going to detail your birth time. I was actually quite shocked to see that mine was on there and I hadn’t even got them for that reason.
Timing is Everything
I was actually interested in just tracking my transits over periods in my life where I hadn’t got diaries to cover it. But anyway my birth time in my medical records puts my birthday to a ‘AA’ rating. And then you’ve got, I think A is mum’s memory. Mum’s memory is quite credible for some, but maybe not all mums; some mums who were probably a little bit overwhelmed and shocked by the whole birth and just didn’t even look at the clock.
And then you’ve got you know, it gets less reliable from there. ‘B’ is quite reliable, but it’s not totally, I think maybe B might be if it’s mentioned in an auto-biography. And then I think ‘C’ maybe if it was, like I mentioned in an interview on TV, somebody said you know, “Oh, I think it was it was raining on the day of my birth”. Or “I believe I heard the church bells ringing. I think it was probably around six o’clock in the evening”, you know, something like that if they’d mentioned it on TV or in an interview. And then you’ve got things like the ‘DD’, which is dirty data, which is just totally unreliable birth data, completely unreliable. And then you have an ‘X’, which is just, there’s no birth data available. You’ve just got the birth date, and possibly don’t even have the location. So you know it’s, it’s not as accurate that kind of astrology.
➡️ Read about the Rodden Rating here
Celebrity Charts at Your Fingertips
But it’s still interesting if you’re sitting down watching TV and something comes up and you think, I wonder what that person’s birth data says about them, and you Google their birth time and calculate a chart. You can put in the sunrise, or you can put the mid-day time and you know, gives you a rough idea of their sun and moon placement.
So that’s, that’s the rating system, which is why astro.com or Astro DataBank is very trusted in its data accuracy. And so that’s one side of things that’s really interesting about it. And then the other side of things, the Astro-Wiki is literally like a Wikipedia of astrological information. You’ve got astrology information on Wikipedia, which some of it is quite interesting and some of it’s quite accurate, but I don’t think it really has that kind of understanding that you would get from a website that is built around astrology. So it’s a very very, it’s just an amazing resource. Like I said, it’s just really, really amazing. You should definitely take advantage of it. Now, let me explain how to create your birth chart.
Free Horoscopes Galore!
Oh, I forgot one other thing. The other thing that’s really great about astro.com is there are lots of free horoscopes on there. So once you’ve created your chart, you can then go in and have a look at the short report forecast by Rob Hand. And then there’s some synastry reports that you can look at by Liz Green. And there’s a number of things that you can explore there. So it really is an amazing tool. And as I have urged you so much already, I urge you again to go into astro.com and explore.
I’ve written a blog post on this, so you can actually check out my blog post if you’d like to see a little step by step with images. I will talk you through it anyway.
Create Your Account
So in a nutshell you need to:
- Login,
- Create a profile,
- Enter your details,
- Add new Astro data,
- Select the desired chart,
- Go to extended chart selection to create your settings,
- Click to show the chart.
That’s literally the process, but let’s do a step by step. So you can go to the top right hand corner of the home screen of Astro Dienst/astro.com. And all you have to do is look, there’s a bit that would say ‘not logged in’, so you can just press login next to it. And it asks you to create a free registered user profile. Now on my website I think that screen may actually be highlighted in red anyway, the little link that you need to click on, but it’s got a little green man next to it.
So all we need to do is create a free registered user profile: enter your details on the following screen and select, okay. And it will prompt you to do this twice unless they’ve updated their website and they don’t anymore.
But from my last recollection they did now, what you need to do is add new Astro data in the user profile overview window. There is a little link at the bottom, and that should just pop up in front of you. So it shouldn’t be too hard to find, but there’s a little bit there that says ‘add new Astro data’, which you can see in the post that I’ve written. And then you can input the chart details and the required fields and press continue. So there’s a bit that says ‘birth data entry’. So you can put in your name gender, if you want to specify birthday, the hour and minutes of birth, if you’ve got that information, and if you don’t, you could just put midday or sunrise or midnight, whatever you prefer.
My personal choice would be to go for midday, because it means that the moon is going to be at the slap bang middle position of the day, rather than if you did a midnight chart, it’s like right at the beginning of the day. So you wouldn’t really necessarily be able to see whether or not it was actually going to change signs or not. If it was right at the end of the sign. So with a midday chart is kind of like an average overview and kind of gives you a professional outlook of that person, of that individual.
And then you have to put in the country and the birth town. There’s a nice little teaser in the corner of that box: it’ll tell you the Sun, Moon and Ascendant of the person whose birth chart data you’re entering.
So it gets you all excited to see the chart when it pops up, then you need to select the desired chart. So it’ll bring up your stored Astro data, and you should have just one there, which will be yours. And then you can select that link and it will take you through to a window which offers you lots of different things. So from what I can see here, you’ve got the child’s horoscope, children and young people, direct Atlas query, your VIP Astro twins which is interesting because that has all the people that they’ve got on the DataBank that share your birthdate – your solar twins and maybe even people born on the same day as you. So that’s an interesting one to look at.
Advanced Chart Settings
But what I want you to look at is the Extended Chart Selection. You can go to Chart Drawing Ascendant, and that’s fine. You can go there quickly and it just calculates it for you. But the extended chart selection is good to familiarize yourself with that because it’s some of the settings. So you’ve got a reset button there and that can help you to remove or modify settings. You won’t need to press that the first time you go in.
Start Date (for charts marked with *) allows you to input the date you’d like to view the planets as transits, and displays them around the outer part of the wheel in green. So if you don’t input that, we’ll just put that day’s day. But if you wanted to look at the transits for a date that you had back in 1993, specifically, you could enter that date, and it would bring that up around the wheel.
House System allows you to experiment with different house systems. The default one will be Placidus. I would urge you to experiment with Equal house. Initially it’s just a little bit easier to understand the chart as it’s equally divided. Everyone’s brought up differently – I was brought up on Equal.
And Additional Objects are anything else you’d like to displayed on the wheel from the box at the bottom of the screen. So if you wanted to select more than one at a time, you press CTRL (control) on the keyboard and then click on the ones that you want. And that’s using windows, I think possibly on Mac. It might be CMD that you need to press (command) and then click it. And then once you’ve done that you can show I think you press, Oh, yes. I think that’s literally you select what you want.
And then you click to Show the chart, and that’s literally, it will bring it up. I would say don’t bother putting anything additional in when you first calculate it. Literally just calculate the natal chart wheel, go for web default style, stick with that – I’d go for equal house system and you can, once you’ve got the settings you like, you can I think on the next window, when it brings up the chart, it says save/set as default settings, you can do that. And then the next time you go in, it’ll have everything that you’ve selected. So it’s worth playing with it. And I’ll explain at a later date, what’s on the other things, but it lasts you about house system and Zodiac – we’ll talk about houses later on.
Zodiac – we will talk about that too. But you definitely want to leave it as ‘Western geocentric tropical‘, because that’s what I’m teaching you, Okay? If you want to go to another podcast and learn about Sidereal or Vedic or different areas, be my guest! But over here, you’re going to be learning about Western geocentric tropical, because that’s what I do. And it’s the astrology that we practice in the West, anyway. I know a lot of Vedic astrologers in the West, but it’s generally our style over here.
Now, once you’ve shown the chart it will come up, you’ve generated your drawing. You can switch the transits on by clicking the button that says ‘show transits‘ or ‘with transits‘. And you can, like I said, save your default setting. If you like the settings that you’ve got. And if you want to change things, you can ‘go back to chart selection’ and go back in and add extra bodies and look for asteroids and things like that.
Alternative Ways to Create Your Chart
So that’s basically in a nutshell how to do it. I’ll include a link with the walkthrough that I’ve got from my website. And if you’re not really interested in creating an account with astro.com, you can just go to the link on my website which helps you create your birth chart on my website. I’ll add the link at the top of the link at the bottom of this description as well. So yeah, I’ll explain in future episodes how you can get into more detail of reading the chart, but for now you should be totally mesmerized by this fascinating mysterious wheel of information, shrouded with symbols, and it really is something that you suddenly just want to really explore.
So we’ll go into that in the next episode, but for now, thank you. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please subscribe, please rate, and please review. It helps other people find me who are looking for this kind of information. And if you’d like to be more involved, you can send me your chart details – all you have to do is subscribe. And I’ll send you all the information through the subscription link and I can then analyze your chart and include it in future episodes of the podcast where I think it will fit.
That’s a Wrap!
So thank you very much for listening to today’s episode. I hope you have fun generating your natal chart and pondering over the symbols. If you can’t wait until the next episode, you can start clicking around astro.com to find out what all of it means, but I will help you unpick the mystery of your natal chart in the coming episodes. But first I will include a little bit of information about some of the astrology books, I think you will find so helpful. So please do tune into the next episode.
And if you haven’t already go back and listen to the first couple of episodes that I’ve recorded, which go into a little bit about the chart of The Stellium Astrology Podcast, and also a little bit about the mission of the podcast, me, who I am, where I’ve come from and what I’m all about. So thanks very much for tuning in, come say “Hi!” On social media, and don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks a lot, take care.