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Release Notes for Version 9.8 of AstrolDeluxe Platinum

See screenshots and read the details about additions to version 9 of AstrolDeluxe Platinum.

The Windows Help for version 9.1 of AstrolDeluxe was up-to-date as of May 30, 2016.

Version 9.1.5 added to Customization, Initial Chart Display, a checkbox to Copy PowerGraph to Wheel Page. When this box is checked, and at the Chart Information screen's Display menu you select the Wheel with Grids Page, at the bottom right of the scrollable and printable page will appear the colorful Planet Strengths bar graph, AKA PowerGraph. It appears next to the triangular aspects grid and it replaces the grids with the planets' sign and house degrees. This is appropriate since the power graph depends on the aspects to derive each planet's harmonious and inharmonious strengths. Use this method to print out your client's Planet Strengths bar graph.

Version 9.1.5 also marks a newer version of the PC Atlas time changes file. Clicking on the Table button for cities in Australia and Israel will now show time changes extending to the year 2019.

Version 9.1.7 added to Customization, Miscellaneous Preferences a choice to turn off the default Add Angular Weight to Planet Strengths. All along, to arrive at the planet strengths the program been adding up how close are all the aspects to each planet and then has been looking to see if the planet is within five degrees of one of the four chart angles. The user has had the ability to modify the planet strengths by going to Customization, Aspect Orbs, but has not been able to exclude the strength that the program adds due to closeness to a chart angle. This customization choice adds that control, and makes it possible not just to see the extent contributed to a planet's strength as a result of being within five degrees of the Ascendant, Descendant, Midheaven, or I.C., but also to more easily compare to and evaluate other strength systems, such as Astrodynes, without the complication added by angularity.

Version 9.1.8 added to Customization, Miscellaneous Preferences a new choice to emphasize the strength of any aspect when it is within one degree of being exact.

This goes against the rule that only the orb allowed for an aspect determines its strength. The default orb allowed for the 45-degree and 135-degree minor square aspects between planets is 3 degrees, whereas the default orb allowed for major aspects between planets is 6 degrees. This meant that even if a minor square was exact, it would not appear in the aspects section of an interpretation report until after major aspects that were 3 degrees from being exact had been listed. If this function is turned on, then as much as one degree of strength can be added to the strength of an aspect that is exact, pushing it higher in the aspects section of an interpretation report. If the aspect is 45 minutes from being exact, then only 15 minutes of strength will be added to it. This has the effect of putting the interpretation for Wilt Chamberlain's extremely exact Mercury semi-square Mars aspect in the top three aspects, as opposed to in the top seven.

There is also the problem of the strength given to Moon aspects in an unknown birth time chart. The Moon is always calculated for a time of noon when you indicate that the birth time is unknown. But its position could be plus or minus 7 degrees from its position at noon. We don't really want the aspects section to start with an exact Moon aspect that may be incorrect for a person with an unknown birth time. There is no more room on the Miscellaneous Preferences form for an additional choice, so I made it so that if you select to emphasize aspects that are exact, the program will also reduce the strength of aspects involving an unknown time Moon in half, both for interpretation reports and for the Planet Strengths bar graph.

 

Version 9.2.1 introduced a Graphic Aspectarian feature under Options. You can choose one month or one year. The Aspectarian will be for the planets overhead, the aspects between the moving planets, unless you have selected a chart in the Saved Charts listbox and you click the form's box to Use Selected Chart. The calculations can be in Heliocentric if you have that Zodiac selected. Financial astrologers often consider heliocentric aspects in addition to the usual geocentric aspects.

The Graphic Aspectarian summarizes the weather, which can be harmonious or discordant, affecting a particular planet over time, by using different colors for the aspect lines. Intensity is shown by varying the thickness of the lines. The Graphic Aspectarian adds up all the aspect lines for each day for a particular aspected planet and shows a colorful summary of varying thickness in a row for that planet. You can scroll down on the form in order to see every one of the aspected planets, their summaries, and the aspects made by each of your selected aspecting planets. Depending upon your selections, there can be up to 18 aspected planets. If you click on the Collapse button, the individual aspects will disappear, leaving just the colorful aspect summary lines for each planet and one big colorful aspect summary row at the top. The Graphic Aspectarian feature makes it easy to see at a glance the nature and power of the aspects for a particular date, for the world in general or for a particular individual.

You can customize aspect colors at Customization, Chart Colors, Sign & Aspect Colors. The aspectarian will always use the neutral color of gray for Conjunction aspects.

Version 9.2.2 fixed an error 91 problem with Edit, Select All in the results of Options, Find Compatible Charts. Also did some clean-up of the spacing when the astro font is turned on and for results greater than 9 matches.

Version 9.2.3 updates the hsc9032.dll calculation library. Was capable of freezing in a loop when calculating the anomaly. Added a counter to exit after 2000 iterations.

Version 9.2.3 updates ancient date handling when calculating eclipses.

 

Version 9.3.1 lets you select a checkbox, Refine Results with Aspect Orbs, at Customization, Aspect Patterns. After finding an aspect pattern or configuration in a chart, using the 120 sections that define the 35 patterns, version 9.3 can apply an additional test to see if the found planets are within the orbs that you have defined at Customization, Aspect Orbs. This will ensure that you only see aspect patterns listed for a chart where all the planets making up the pattern are in tight and valid aspects.

Version 9.3.1 lets you click on a new choice on the Display menu called Separate Wheels when you have a biwheel, triwheel, or quadwheel, from having compared one chart to another on the File menu, in order to load a new form with up to four small wheels, showing your charts with their houses. The form can be scrolled, zoomed in and out, copied, and printed. You control whether these separate little wheels have colored lines or black lines by whether Print in Color is checked at Customization, Chart Colors, Planet & Chart Colors.

It turns out that, in previous versions, the Halloran TrueType Font, that is bundled with AstrolDeluxe Platinum, was not being used for the planet sign glyphs when you had Wheel Font turned on. The sharp sign glyphs were only being used for the house cusps - the program was still drawing the sign glyphs for the planet positions graphically. So with version 9.3.1 the wheels will start inserting the sign glyphs from the font. I also worked on improving the appearance of the printed charts.

Version 9.3.2 makes sure that the captions are appropriate for the Wheel with Grids Page and for the Separate Wheels Page, which pages reuse the same form. This minor version also unloads the form before use so that all the properties will start with their default values.

 

Version 9.4 adds to the chart Display menu, underneath Planet Strengths, a new choice for Map of Degree Strengths. This round graph is based on the zodiac-proportional chart wheel, that already had tick marks for each zodiac degree. This new graph adds degree tick marks to the inside of the wheel. Strength rays for each degree project towards the center of the wheel. The light blue part of each ray is for the degree's strength from harmonious aspects. The red part is for the degree's strength from inharmonious aspects. You can visually see where in the chart there is a concentration of harmonious and inharmonious energy.

How are the degree strengths calculated? For each degree, the program temporarily puts an inactive planet there, and then calculates what would be the harmonious and inharmonious aspects to it from the active planets. You have some control over what are the active planets at Customization, Planets. You also have some control over the strengths at Customization, Aspect Orbs. Other choices at Customization, Miscellaneous Preferences can affect the degree strengths, such as Add Angular Weight to Planet Strengths and Emphasize Strength When Orb Exact (<1).

This new Map of Degree Strengths complements the AstrolDeluxe program's Planet Strengths bar graph by adding, on either side, tables of harmonious, inharmonious, and total strengths for the twelve houses and the twelve signs. These strength calculations are different from those of Astrodynes. No account is taken of house rulerships. The calculated values provide an alternative whose derivation is straightforward and subject to user control.

While the program is calculating, it can output to a *.csv file the strengths for each degree if beforehand you go to File and select Save Degree Strengths to File. As long as a file location and name are sitting in the program's temporary memory, the program will write the details to this file. You can easily read files with a *.csv extension in programs such as Windows Notepad or Microsoft Excel.

The program will find the six strongest degrees in the chart and will display them in a small grid to the left of the screen graph. The grid has two columns, one for Strengths and one for Degrees. You can pop up the Sabian Symbol interpretation for one of these six strong degrees by double-clicking on the degree value. Do not be surprised if you find a deep, underlying correspondence between your strongest degree and the Sabian Symbol for it.

The pop-up form allows you to print the degree interpretation or to add your own notes. The ability to print each degree interpretation makes up for the fact that the grid with the strongest degrees is not part of the Map of Degree Strengths form -- the grid will not be included if you choose to print this map.

Symbolism for the 360 degrees started long ago, perhaps with an ancient author known as Teucros the Babylonian and a book called the Sphaera Barbarica. I must have five books published in the twentieth century devoted to degree interpretations, in any of which you can research alternatives to the provided Sabian Symbol interpretations.

Version 9.4.1 makes a fix to the aspect patterns report when Refine Results with Aspect Orbs is checked at Customization, Aspect Patterns. The report was capable of dropping an important exact pattern that did appear at Display, Graphic Aspects, such as a tight Kite pattern. It had to do with how the interpretation report tries to interpret the most general version of a pattern, which was conflicting with eliminating patterns that are not within orb. The Refine Results with Aspect Orbs checkbox is a new feature that was just added to Platinum with 9.3.1.

Version 9.4.2 adds DoEvents in between calculation of the strength of each degree in the Map of Degree Strengths. This prevents a Not Responding condition from occurring on slower computers and it causes the wheel map to display as it is being drawn or built. I also made it unnecessary for the Moon's Nodes to be turned on in order for the degree strengths to be calculated.

 

Starting with version 9.5, AstrolDeluxe Platinum can automatically work with separate male and female natal interpretation files. This is in preparation for a new natal report where all the delineations will derive from actual research into male and female charts and biographies. If the selected natal interpretation file is called BEGIN.HNP, the program will get interpretations from that file for Male and Neutral gender charts, but the program will automatically try to get interpretations from a file called BEGINF.HNP for Female gender charts. Also, more generally, if the selected interpretation file root name ends with "MC", that file will be used for Male and Neutral gender charts, but the program will automatically try to use a matching file ending with "FC" for Female gender charts. These file names, ending with "MC" and "FC", correspond to what the Edit Interpretations program creates if you go to edit a previously unedited natal interpretation file and you answer the New File prompt by selecting "Make Separate File Copies for Males and Females."

Version 9.5 added the progressed Life Diagram that Reinhold Ebertin developed in 1968. On the Options menu, I changed Moving Graphic Ephemeris to have four submenus: Transit Ephemeris, Progressed Ephemeris, Declination Ephemeris, and Progressed Declinations. The Transit Ephemeris has the original Moving Graphic Ephemeris function and the Progressed Ephemeris does the new Life Diagram. A chart must be selected in the Saved Charts listbox, or else Progressed Ephemeris and Progressed Declinations will be grayed out. Unless you click on the Prog Type button, which brings up the Progress Chart selections form, the Start button will begin to draw planet lines for major progressions starting from the birth date. About 80 years worth of major or Secondary Progressions will fit on the screen.

The time span is the same if you select Solar Arc Directions at Prog Type, since solar arc directions move every planet at the rate of the progressed Sun's longitude. Solar Arc Direction contacts to planets in the natal chart can be very accurate for timing events. Ebertin used both major Progressions and Solar Arc Directions. Ebertin also looked at the graph of progressed declinations, so I added declination graphs to version 9.5. When doing the progressed declination graph, there is no Prog Type choice for Solar Arc Directions because of the fluctuating nature of declination calculations - if you calculate the major progressed chart for the 30th birthday of a person born on December 6, 15 days before the solstice, the Sun's declination will seem not to have moved at all since birth, still being at 22 S 35. That is because the progressed Sun reached its maximum declination of 23 S 26 around the 15th birthday, and then slowly retreated from that maximum, so the Sun's progressed declination is not useful for directing other planets.

You can also select Minor Progressions or Tertiary Progressions, but those involve more cycles in a given time span, so they let you change the starting date and year to be later than the birth date at the Prog Type screen. Ebertin liked to view the progressed planets, Ascendant, and Midheaven making contacts to the natal points against the background of a 45-degree graphic ephemeris - if you want to duplicate that, the form lets you select and apply a harmonic of 8.

In cosmobiology, Ebertin focused on aspect angles of 0, 180, 90, 45, and 135 degrees. The 45-degree graphic ephemeris collapses the natal planet positions, indicated by horizontal lines coming from the right side of the graph, so that any of these five hard aspects is indicated by a progressed planet line crossing or intersecting a natal planet line on the graph. Ebertin says that for the swiftly moving planets, a condition can start to develop one or two years before the aspect is exact, while for the slower moving planets it can develop as much as ten years before the aspect is exact. Chapter 8 of Ebertin's 408-page final book, Astrological Healing, has over 100 pages devoted to Case Studies using the Life Diagram. Its advantage is that the astrologer can visually see when in the life a hard aspect will apply and when it will be over.

Version 9.5.3 made a couple of minor fixes to the Life Diagrams, such as ensuring that the degrees on the right side appeared in black and that a birthday late in the year did not throw off the calibration of the years and the timing of when aspects occur.

Version 9.5.4 fixes a problem running the LifeTrends transits report from the chronological transits list for an unknown birth time chart. This problem affects all recent Platinum program versions. Quite a while ago, I made what I considered a logical fix to the transits list - to not put a planet's house in parentheses after the planet name if it is an unknown birth time chart, not realizing that such a change would affect the parsing of the transits list by the routine to create the transits interpretation report, which expected all planet names to be followed by the planet's house number in parentheses. The transits report routine is now fixed to be aware if the report is for an unknown birth time and it will only include planetary aspects - nothing about house ingresses.

Here is the workaround until you get the fix...

For unknown birth time charts, either do the Here and Now LifeTrends transits report or create Sunrise copies of the unknown time charts and run the chronological LifeTrends lists and reports against the Sunrise copies.

To make a Sunrise copy, call up the unknown birth time chart and on the right side click the Copy button. The Copy button divorces the chart from the original saved chart, which you probably want to keep as an unknown time chart. Then click on the Sunrise button. If you look in the time field you can see that the correct time for sunrise has been inserted. Then add a space and the word Sunrise to either the First Name or the Last Name field. Then Calculate to get the wheel and Save this new chart record to the charts file.

You should be able to select the Sunrise chart and run the chronological LifeTrends transits report against it.

Version 9.5.5 detects Event Type when converting Solar Fire 5 chart records and writes Male or Female without prompting the user for this info.

 

Version 9.6 adds a powerful new capability to Options, Research Charts. The program now has the ability to combine different searches in an OR manner. This is different from its long established method, in which each subsequent search is of the results of the previous search, which combines searches in an AND manner. Astrological researchers who wanted to combine charts in OR searches have in the past used the AstroDatabank program. However, the last version of AstroDatabank, version 4, dates back to 2006, making it compatible with Windows XP but not with newer versions of Windows, and it is no longer for sale. To give an example of an OR search, you could say that you wanted to see just those charts that have Mars on the Midheaven, OR that have Mars on the Ascendant, OR that have Mars conjunct the Sun, OR that have the chart ruling planet conjunct Mars. You get many more results by doing an OR search than you do from searching for just one factor.

You turn on OR searches by clicking the checkbox near the top that says Direct search to OR page. Or you can tab to it and press the spacebar. Then when you perform one of the 26 available searches, instead of immediately changing the found records to reflect the search results, the search is added to a Page of OR Searches that pops up at the bottom of the screen. The Page of OR Searches consists of a listbox with all the searches that you want to OR together. An example search could show:

1. Sun is in the 1st House
2. Sun is in Aries

At the bottom of the Page of OR Searches you see buttons that let you Delete a Selected Search or Combine OR Searches into Results List. There is a checkbox "Have Combine also print a summary of the search to the current printer". The Combine button will combine all of your separate searches, eliminate the duplicates, show the found results, and make the Page of OR Searches go away. If the print checkbox is checked, then before the form closes it will print to the current printer the chart file's starting count and ending count with all of the OR searches that were listed at the page. It can be very helpful to have the starting and ending count when you are trying to determine significance. If you want to retain these results without wasting paper, make your PDF printer driver the current printer so that you will be prompted to enter the pdf file name. You can use this feature to automatically record the starting count and ending count of a search even when you are doing just a single search.

At Search Two, By Aspect, there is now a checkbox that says "Multi select aspects". When this is checked, the combo box that lets you select a single aspect or to type in the value of any angle changes to a listbox that accepts multiple selections. For example, you can say that you want all the charts that have Sun conjunct Moon, Sun trine Moon, and Sun sextile Moon - so you do not have to tediously select each of these as a separate OR search.

Version 9.6.2 added word wrapping to all four displays or printouts of the criteria for a search, in order to accommodate the long Multi-select aspect criteria. This means that if the display or print line is too long it will wrap to the next line. It does not work with the Page of OR Searches listbox, but it does work with the checkbox for "Have Combine also print a summary of the search to the current printer". It also works with Print Search Results, the Group Signature, and with the Historical Graph.

Version 9.6.2 added an Exclude checkbox to Search Two, By Aspects. With this box checked, the remaining names in the list will be all the charts that do NOT HAVE the searched for aspect(s).

Version 9.6.3 fixes an array size problem connected to adding Eris in version 9.0. It manifested when searching for charts with a particular hemisphere emphasis at Options, Research Charts, Searth Three, Modalities etc.

Version 9.6.4 automatically unchecks the Multi-Select box at By Aspect when the user selects the Search Three tab, as the aspect searches on that tab do not use the multi-select aspects listbox.

Version 9.6.4 causes the By Aspect search to use the Sliding Scale for the parallel or contraparallel declination aspects when this is selected at Customization, Aspects and when the box "Use default orb" is checked.

Version 9.6.4 further expands the width of the Page of OR Searches listbox.

Version 9.6.4 adds a checkbox at the bottom of the Page of OR Searches that says "Save this list of searches for future use". If you check this box, then the searches will be saved to a savesrch.csv file and the tempOR#.lst files will be copied to saveOR#.lst files. When the program detects the existence of this file, clicking on the Research Charts form checkbox "Direct search to OR page" will pop-up a question whether to load the saved searches into the OR page. If you no longer want the saved searches, choose Cancel to delete the file. You might want to save and reload a set of searches if you are experimenting with adding refinements to a basic search, that you do not want to laboriously recreate over and over again.

Version 9.6.4 adds Printer Setup to Search on the Research Charts form menu bar. You might want to temporarily Print Search Results to a pdf file. Also adds a new choice, Print Search Results with No Names.

Version 9.6.4 adds a Multi-House checkbox to the By House search tab. This checkbox switches the list of houses to a list that allows multiple selections. You might want to get a list of all charts with Mercury in the 3rd house or in the 9th house.

 

Version 9.7 adds an in-depth Aspects Grid to the Display menu. This is a larger and more informative version of the small triangular aspects grid that can appear at the bottom left of a printed chart or on the special Wheel with Grids Page. This full-size Aspects Grid uses the Halloran astro wheel font, that comes bundled with AstrolDeluxe Platinum, to show what if any aspect exists between the planets indicated by the intersecting columns and rows, but also indicates with the letters 'a' or 's' whether the aspect is applying or separating. If the declinations of two planets makes them parallel or contraparallel, the declination aspect symbols will appear together with the zodiacal aspect symbols. The orb of the applying or separating aspect is shown in degrees and minutes.

The default is to show the orbs for the zodiacal aspects. If you want to see the declination aspect orbs instead, click the checkbox for Declination Orbs. The screen will redraw with that different set of orbs.

There is a Print Form button, and above it a Printer Setup button that allows you to switch from Portrait to Landscape. Whether the grid fits on Portrait or requires Landscape depends upon if you have selected more than 7 planet points in the Include column at Customization, Planets.

The chart name, birth data, and remarks appear in three text boxes at the top, that will be part of any printout. You can modify or add your own notes about the chart and its aspects to the contents of these text boxes before printing.

Version 9.7.1 adds DoEvents commands after all important print commands throughout the program as a way to prevent customers from experiencing printer device timeouts.

The new aspects grid lets the astrologer pick out which aspects in the chart are applying and therefore strongest. Version 9.7.2 allows the astrologer to click on and immediately read a pop-up interpretation for any aspect in the aspects grid. This increases the grid's use as a hands-on tool for analyzing a chart. The astrologer is more likely to spend time analyzing a chart's aspects when he or she can single out the most important aspects and immediately read their meaning. The caption of the pop-up interpretation form will also tell you the name of any aspect whose glyph you do not recognize.

Version 9.7.2 adds a basic mapping for the glyphs that the aspects grid needs if the user has not yet done that from the Customization menu.

Version 9.7.3 adds Angles Graph as a choice at the very bottom of the aspects list at Research Charts, Search Two, By Aspect. If you select this Angles Graph choice with two different planets, instead of finding the charts that have a particular aspect, the program will open a graph. The graph will show how many people in your file have each of the 180 possible degree angles between your two specified planets. The program looks at the angle of separation between the specified planets for each of the charts in your file. If the angle is between 0 degrees and 1 degree, then the total for that angle will be incremented by one. At the end, the total instances for each degree of separation is indicated by an x on this graph. Evenly spaced along the x-axis there appear 18 vertical lines marked 0, 10, 20, and so on up to 180 degrees. The y-axis is incremented in units of 5, from 0 to 100. Sometimes, the program must increase the y-axis scale, such as for Neptune and Pluto, to make room for the totals of all the people who were born with these two planets exactly sixty degrees apart.

Version 9.7.3 erases whatever is in the planet speeds array when one retrieves a saved chart using Quick Display. Then, if the planet speeds array is blank when one selects the new Aspects Grid, the user gets a message: "Warning. Quick Display does not get the planet speeds. You must Calculate a chart to see if aspects are Applying or Separating." If the program does not have planet speeds, instead of displaying the letters 'a' and 's' in the aspects grid, it always displays 'p' for 'partile', which is neither applying nor separating.

Version 9.7.3 modifies the choice of Mean or True for the Black Moon Lilith at Customization, Planets. It changes Mean to say Mean (recommend). When I researched biographies while writing the Black Moon Lilith interpretations, it was the Mean Apogee positions that gave rich and significant results.

Version 9.7.4 adds a button to the Page of OR Searches that says "See Exclusions Only". This button returns the charts that are the opposite of what the Combine button would find and return. So the button See Exclusions Only shows the charts that do not meet any of the criteria of the searches that are combined on the OR Page.

With version 9.7.5, the pop-up aspect interpretations form will no longer look for an aspect in the aspect patterns file. Previously, when one clicked on an aspect either in the Single Planet Aspect Window or in the new Aspects Grid, the program always got the LastDataFile. But if the last natal report generated was an aspect patterns report, the LastDataFile would be the asppat.hnp file, which contains only pattern interpretations, not aspect interpretations. It was still possible to select one of the other natal interpretation files listed to the right of the pop-up form, but with this change the program detects whether the LastDataFile contains "asppat" and, if so, substitutes the user's Personal Path or Spirit Success natal report file.

Version 9.7.6 fixes a problem getting a pop-up interpretation for the declination parallel and contraparallel aspects when one clicks on the planet strengths bar graph. Fixed by substituting the short forms PRL and CPL for the spelled-out forms Parallel and Contraparallel.

Version 9.7.6 adds to the By Aspect search at Options, Research Charts, Search Two, a checkbox 'Append percentage found to text file', where the program creates the name of the file from the name of the currently loaded charts file. If the currently loaded charts file is alcohol.cht, then if this checkbox is checked, the results of the aspect search will be appended to the file alcoholpct.txt. Each appended line will look like this: Moon parallel (000.000) Venus using an orb of 1° 68 1793 0.0379 This means that out of 1793 charts, 68 charts, or 3.79%, met the criteria. By manually performing all of the aspect searches in which one is interested on the currently loaded charts collection, a text file can be built up fairly quickly. The search results for this collection can then be compared to the same search results found for other chart collections. This lets one see if a particular aspect is found more frequently or less frequently among different types of people.

Version 9.7.7 adds the ability to include 19th century charts in the Historical Frequency table at Options, Research Charts, Historical Graph. If a chart collection has a significant percentage of charts in the 1800s, then the graph will switch from being for the 100 years from 1900 to 2000 to being for the 200 years from 1800 to 2000.

Version 9.7.8 goes back to a change made with version 9.6.4 which enables the By Aspect search to use Charles Jayne's Sliding Scale for the parallel or contraparallel declination aspects (when this is selected at Customization, Aspect Orbs and when the box "Use default orb" is checked). Version 9.7.8 changes the search criteria record for that search from "using an orb of X degrees" to "with sliding scale." This affects what the line says if one checks the new checkbox added with 9.7.6, 'Append percentage found to text file'. For comparing chart collections from different time periods, the sliding scale is more accurate than using a fixed degree amount. If one's chart collection has birth dates that cluster around a time when a slow- moving outer planet is near maximum declination, then when using a fixed orb for aspects any fast-moving aspecting planet would spend more time in parallel or contraparallel to that outer planet for purely astronomical reasons, resulting in more search hits. The sliding scale corrects for this phenomenon, putting chart collections and their aspects on a level playing field.

 

Version 9.8 adds a button to the bottom of the By Aspect search form at Options, Research Charts, Search Two. The button will only become visible if the user clicks on the checkbox added to 9.7.6, 'Append percentage found to text file'. The button says 'Auto Write All Planets for Selected Aspect'. The button automatically does the 120 searches that I was manually doing between all the planets, adding 120 lines to the pct.txt file for the currently loaded charts collection. The ability to automatically rank the frequency of astrological aspects in a particular collection of charts will greatly assist astrological research. I have 22 separate files for 22 categories of people and can use this feature to see how an aspect's frequency differs between alcoholics and athletes, for example.

Version 9.8 adds a choice to the menu bar at Options, Research Charts. The new choice says Table of Aspect Frequencies. When you select this, it opens a Merge to Aspect Frequency Table form which says at the top:

"Use this form to merge to a table of aspect frequencies the separate results from your *pct.txt files. Search Two, By Aspect will create these files when you use the checkbox 'Append percentage found to text file'. There is a long button underneath that checkbox that will automatically write found results and percentages for your selected aspect for all the planets.

"It only makes sense to use this form when you have *pct.txt files from multiple chart file collections, such as the set of 22 different people categories available from Halloran. The process of creating the separate *pct.txt files involves opening each charts collection, one *.cht file at a time."

The form looks in the folder of the currently loaded charts file for any files ending in *pct.txt and displays their names in a listbox at the center of the form. See the note for Version 9.7.6 for creating *pct.txt files. The only addition needed to what is there is that you can create these files for any aspect or angle, manually typing in a particular angle between 0 and 180 that you want to research, if it is not listed. The form shows the default name of the Table file to which it will write. There is a button to change the Table Filename. The button Create Table will grab aspect frequency lines from each of the files listed in the listbox and will merge them together, sorted in order of frequency, in a text table file that is capable of being hundreds of pages in length.

If you want to start over again from scratch with new *pct.txt files, but not lose the results of your previous research, Windows File Explorer makes it easy to select all of your existing *pct.txt files and click first on Edit and Copy and then on Edit and Paste, which will automatically copy to files that start with the word Copy. After which, you can delete your existing *pct.txt files. The form and its Create Table button know to ignore any *pct.txt files that begin with the word Copy.

Version 9.8 removes adding angular weights to declination aspects.

Version 9.8 prevents E for East Point or V for Vertex from displaying on the wheel for an unknown birth time chart. This has gone unnoticed because most users do not have these points selected at Customization, Planets.

Version 9.8 revisits a version 9.1.8 change made to the Customization menu at Miscellaneous Preferences. In addition to emphasizing the strength of a zodiacal aspect when it is within one degree of being exact, when this is selected, the strength of a declination aspect will be emphasized when it is within 20% of the allowed orb for the declination aspect. The declination orb can be fixed or sliding scale. These changes help to ensure that the new declination aspect interpretations are sorted correctly by strength into the aspect interpretations section of an interpretation report. For that to happen, you must have selected Sort Parallels into Aspect Lists at Customization, Miscellaneous Preferences.

Version 9.8 adds a Vocational Ranking screen to the Display menu. This is the practical implementation of the Table of Aspect Frequencies feature that version 9.8 added to the research module. That table established how frequently all the different planetary aspects occur within 22 collections of charts, ranging from Actor to Writer. The Vocational Ranking feature translates these results to the person's chart. It works by going through each aspect in a person's chart, incrementing each of the 22 vocational categories with the percentage that the research found for that aspect. The incremented categories are then sorted from strongest to weakest. For example, the strongest vocational category for Bill Gates is Computer (top aspect is Jupiter conjunct Pluto), Pilots is number two (top aspect is Jupiter sextile Neptune), Psychol is number three (top aspect is Sun parallel Chiron), and Murder is number four (top aspect is Pluto biquintile Midheaven). Understand that I did not determine the strengths of the aspects for each occupation - they were all extracted automatically from the frequencies found in the 35,000 research charts. You should also understand that no one gets a highly ranked category from the contribution of just one aspect - in my experience a highly ranked category is from the addition of many aspects.

When I was in college, I took a test called the Strong Vocational Interest test, named after the author Edward Strong. It gave me an A+ rating in two categories - Computer Programmer and Psychologist, based on my having a personality similar to that of individuals who had succeeded in those two fields. What is interesting is that those are the same two occupations that astrology now puts at the top of my Vocational Ranking list, with Computer number one (top aspect is Sun parallel Ascendant) and Psychol number two (top aspect is Sun opposition Uranus).

The Vocational Ranking feature uses the default aspect orbs for the top 11 zodiacal aspects, from conjunction to semi-sextile. It also uses the sliding scale versions of the parallel and contraparallel declination aspects. The planet points used are the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Ascendant, Midheaven, Moon's North Node, Chiron, East Point, and Black Moon Lilith.

You may be satisfied to apply this Vocational Ranking feature to self, family, friends, and clients. But if you are more ambitious, you can acquire the data on which it is based and do your own research. The data in the form of about 35,000 charts in 22 chart collections, all the *pct.txt files for the aspects, and a 1134-page table of the occupational frequencies for all the aspects is being placed on a separate CD with an instructional text on Automated Statistical Research. You can experiment with additional aspects, any angle from 0 to 180, or aspects to asteroids. You can contribute to the future of astrology by creating files for additional occupations. In this regard, note the declaration by Alois Treindl that Astrodatabank considers birth data to be in the public domain, reserving as proprietary only their written biographical text. The future is bright for astrological research.

Starting with version 9.8.2, the program no longer displays Businessfemale in the Vocational Ranking list for a male and it will no longer display Businessmale in the list for a female. This reduces the list to 21 displayed categories. If the chart is gender neutral, the list will still display both business person categories.

Version 9.8.2 added the ability to click on any occupation listed at Display, Vocational Ranking in order to see a pop-up help bubble showing the planetary aspect that is contributing the most to the rank of that occupation. This makes these ranked categories less of a black box, benefiting both the astrologer and the programmer. Knowing which aspect turned out to contribute to a category can also increase the astrologer's understanding.

Version 9.8.2 added more planetary aspects to the exclude list at Display, Vocational Ranking, based on their being slow, generational planetary aspects. There are now 44 excluded zodiacal aspects and 10 excluded declination aspects. I had to take into account the peaks in Gauquelin's collected data, which sometimes coincided with one of these slow outer-planet aspects, causing the category to have an artificially high frequency for that aspect. Generational aspects are just that - generational - and therefore they must be less important than personal aspects in determining vocation.

There was also an interesting case in the 1940s and 1950s when according to Vail and Pottenger's Tables for Aspect Research there was an abundance of Venus conjunct Mars aspects, an abundance that had nothing to do with all the computer programmers born then, so I excluded the Venus conjunct Mars aspect.

Version 9.8.2 added the ability to search for charts having a particular category as one of the top-three ranked vocations. At Options, Research Charts, this is on the Search Two tab at By Vocation. All the available search tabs are now filled up. So, if you are curious about what other charts have a particular category ranked in the top three, you can now find those charts. The main problem with this search is that it is really slow, so the form tells you the number of the record on which it is working and how many matches it has found. It gives you the opportunity to see just the qualifying chart records found up to that point by pressing the Escape key on your keyboard. If you then refill the search list and run that same search again, the program will ask if you want to resume the search where you left off, instead of at the beginning.

Version 9.8.3 makes three important changes to the Vocational Ranking table.

The table now excludes aspects involving the Moon for Unknown Birth Time charts. The top aspect for a person's top category could have included the Moon, when if the chart was for an Unknown Birth Time, that aspect might not even have been in effect when the person was born.

The table now takes into account how exact each aspect is in the chart when adding up the percentages for each found aspect. It was not right that the top aspect for a person's top category could have a wide orb in the person's chart.

The table no longer adds up the raw percentages exactly as given in the master table, as this was favoring astronomically frequent aspects. Instead it now gets the range for a particular aspect, and adds the percentage departure from the minimum for the category within the range. For example, the top percentage for Sun conjunct Mars in the master table is 0.0882 for Psychol and for the bottom percentage 0.0545 for Musician, giving a range of 0.0337, but for astronomical reasons the top percentage for Sun opposition Mars is only 0.0263 for Pilot and the bottom percentage 0.0059 for Businessfemale. The Sun conjunct Mars aspect is not more powerful than the Sun opposition Mars aspect, so adding together the raw percentages from the master table was too crude of a procedure.

The high or low values that an aspect has for a particular occupation are not being judged according to any absolute standards, but just relative to how often each of the other occupations have that same aspect. It is all relative. The aspects are ranked against each other and the occupations are ranked against each other. The result for each individual is a unique ranking table.

These changes may have the effect of changing the order of a person's category rankings from previous versions, but it is better to make the change now while version 9.8 is still young.

Version 9.8.3 adds the ability to double-click on any occupation listed at Display, Vocational Ranking in order to see a pop-up help bubble showing the three strongest planetary aspects that contribute the most to the rank of an occupation. This is in addition to the single-click feature added with version 9.8.2 that just gets the top aspect for a category.

Version 9.8.4 separates the non-vocational from the vocational categories in the Vocational Ranking table, putting them in a separate section at the bottom. The non-vocational categories are Alcohol, Dementia, Life_80s, and Murder. You can still see the strengths for each of these categories.

Version 9.8.5 fixed a problem with some declination aspects not appearing in the pop-up aspects grid when Sort Parallels into Aspect Lists is selected at Customization, Miscellaneous Preferences. The pop-up aspects grid appears for a particular planet when one double-clicks on the planet's glyph in the wheel.

Version 9.8.6 dealt with the progressions and transits multi-wheels. Worked on the pop-up interpretations that one gets from double-clicking on an aspect in the Single Planet Aspect Window. Made sure that the progressed interpretation knows which is the progressed planet and which is the natal planet. If one has a combination progressions and transits triwheel or quadwheel, made it so that instead of always drawing on the progressions interpretations, when one clicks on an aspect from the transits wheel to either the natal or the progressed wheel that it switches to the transits interpretations. Also, now that I have Sort Parallels into Aspects List turned on, noticed that a solar arc directions biwheel was showing all of those planets as parallel to the natal planets in the Single Planet Aspect Window. Took time to anticipate all instances where the natal chart and the solar arc directions chart could be compared in a biwheel, triwheel, and quadwheel, in order to eliminate spurious parallels.

Version 9.8.6 warns the user if Printer Setup is set to Landscape mode when one selects Separate Wheels from the multi-wheel Display menu. The Separate Wheels only print correctly in Portrait mode.

Version 9.8.7 fixes a problem with the Moon Distance at Chart Analysis. This problem was introduced with Version 9.0.5 that added the new type of retrograde flag at the top of the Chart Analysis table that indicates in how many days each planet will change direction. The program needed to save the value of the Moon Distance before calculating forward in time to see when the planets would change direction. You might think that the Moon does not need to be part of the retrograde flag calculations, but it does because the Moon's True Node can go from retrograde to direct.

Version 9.8.8 eliminated all use of declinations during display of a composite chart. The composite chart does not have declinations so what was in the declination arrays was left over from the natal chart of the 2nd person in the comparison.

Version 9.8.8 updates the nataldf.ini file to add a new template - Standard with Declination Aspects.

Version 9.8.8 improves the printing of a single interpretation from the pop-up interpretation form. Lowers the starting line and expands the width of the printed text across the page in accordance with the customized body font size.

Version 9.8.9 fixes a couple of problems with the solar return report when translated into Spanish. It also fixes a problem with the new Vocational Ranking table when the computer is set for a decimal separator other than the period. It was not working to get the value of a number string when the decimal separator is a comma, as it is in some regions of the world.


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Last modified on August 1, 2018.

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