Some hours are better than others.
WhenStars works out the planetary hours for the place you are standing, from a real ephemeris, and says in plain English what each one is fit for.
Free, and no account is needed to look around. The download installs without the Play Store; how to install it, and why it will not update from the store afterwards. No iPhone yet, and nothing to install at all? Open it in a browser instead - it is the same app.
Twelve unequal hours of day, and twelve of night.
The daylight is divided into twelve and so is the darkness, so in summer an hour of day runs long and an hour of night runs short.
- Runs
- Good for
- Careful with
Point the rule at any hour on the ring to read it. The instrument keeps real time; the sky behind it is wound on sixty times so you can watch it turn.
Not a horoscope. A timetable.
Every day is cut into planetary hours from true sunrise and sunset at your coordinates. Each one is weighed against your own birth chart and laid out as a day you can read at a glance.
- Positions
- Planets come from the JPL DE440s ephemeris and are checked against Swiss Ephemeris to within a hundredth of a degree. Placidus houses, tropical zodiac, the traditional seven.
- Method
- Dignity, sect and rulership follow seventeenth-century practice rather than a modern shorthand. When the engine calls an hour difficult, you can open the reasoning and read why.
- Words
- Over three thousand passages, fixed in place. The same sky gets the same words every time, it works with no signal, and nothing is being made up at the moment you read it.
- Scope
- Seven parts of life scored apart from one another. A morning can be good for a hard conversation and poor for signing anything, and the app will say so.
A beta, and here is what is missing.
Everything above works today: the chart, the scoring and the calendar all do what this page says they do. What follows is what they do not do yet, because finding out for yourself is a worse way to learn it.
There is nothing to buy
Nothing can be bought while the beta runs. A new account gets thirty days of the whole calendar for nothing. There will be a price once the stores are ready, and no one will be charged without saying yes first.
No iPhone app
Android and the browser for now. iOS wants an Apple developer account and a review cycle, and it follows once the beta settles. The web version works perfectly well on an iPhone meanwhile, and if you would rather be told when the real one lands, say so.
English only
German, Spanish, Ukrainian and Slovak are the ones I want next. The machinery for translating the library exists and has deliberately not been run, because three thousand passages of astrological English need a speaker of each language to read them before they ship, and that takes far longer than the translating does.
No sign in with Google or Apple
An email address and a password for now. Nothing is handed to anyone either way, which is the part that actually matters.
The hours are quieter than they should be
The ruler of each planetary hour does not yet feed the score, so one hour differs from the next by less than a traditional astrologer would expect. Day readings are unaffected. This is a matter of doctrine, and it is being settled rather than patched.
More technique is owed
Time-lord periods, mutual reception, the rest of accidental dignity, and transit-to-transit aspects. What is there is right; there is simply more of it owed.
If something looks wrong, it may well be. Write and tell me, and I will fix it.