Fwd: Apogee and perigee ephemerides

[Graham Douglas]

Dear Ray,

                Chris Mitchell of Bristol astrology suggested I contact you after I sent him this email. I would be very grateful for any help or suggestions you may be able to offer.             

             So far I have been studying the Gauquelin database  and stumbled across what looks like evidence that the tidal effects of the moon influence birth rates, (there are good geophysical reasons why this might be true, so potentially this is an exciting finding) and one thing I need to do is look at the data coording to the elongation or phase of the moon from its perigee or apogee, but the program I use Jigsaw 2 lacks this factor in their ephemeris.

            I don't know if you are familiar with this program, but while it is easy to import data in ASCII format I don't think it can be exported.

             The files are too large (300 to 3000 births) to work thought them manually.

           I know this is a bit vague but perhaps its a starting point, do you think there might be a way I could work towards a solution ?

            Best wishes,

             Graham Douglas.

       

[Ray Murphy]

On Feb 29, 2:40 am, Graham Douglas <ondastropic...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Dear Ray,
> Chris Mitchell of Bristol astrology suggested I
> contact you after I sent him this email. I would be very grateful
> for any help or suggestions you may be able to offer.

Hi Graham,
First of all, your message didn't appear immediately on this group
because Google's system held it up for a short time. Secondly, I'm
very pleased to see you post here amongst the others who are dedicated
to astrological research in one way or another.

> So far I have been studying the Gauquelin database
> and stumbled across what looks like evidence that the tidal effects
> of the moon influence birth rates, (there are good geophysical
> reasons why this might be true, so potentially this is an exciting
> finding) and one thing I need to do is look at the data coording to
> the elongation or phase of the moon from its perigee or apogee, but
> the program I use Jigsaw 2 lacks this factor in their ephemeris.

> I don't know if you are familiar with this program, but
> while it is easy to import data in ASCII format I don't think it can
> be exported.
> The files are too large (300 to 3000 births) to work
> thought them manually.
> I know this is a bit vague but perhaps its a starting
> point, do you think there might be a way I could work towards a
> solution ?

RM: I'm familiar with the main facilities of Jigsaw and agree that it
cannot do what you're looking for. Yes, we can certainly find a
solution. I think the ideal one is to extract the moon's position
(from perigree to apogee) from the Swiss Ephemeris in a small, new
home made research program. I've actually done what you're lookiing
for in my own research program by temporarily swapping a planet for
the moon's distance from earth . That's when I noticed that there were
about nineteen times less earthquakes at perigree. Unfortunately I was
stuck for space in my program at the time so I removed it.

I'd volunteer to process your data straight away if I could be sure
that I'd be able to remember how to re-set (hard-wire) the program,
but at this moment I forget what's involved. I'm not a trained
programmer so everything involving the Swiss Ephemeris is still hard,
although Chris Mitchell would probably laugh and say "Just swap this
for that" :-)

If we cannot find an easy and quick solution for your own free program
to do what you're looking for, I'll see what I can do. It will be
easier to see the best way to go when I get a clearer picture of
what's involved, but at the moment I'm visualising the processing of
just a few batches of data [in the Jigsaw .DAT format] where you
simply want a score for each of the moons' positions in it's perigree
to apogee cycle displayed as 100 or 180 bars in a graph. The latter is
convenient for me if I get involved.

You mentioned importing ASCII into Jigsaw. That shouldn't be necessary
for any of the Gauquelin files these days because there have been
quite a few translations done from the tab-delimited format of the
data on the CURA site.
Still, if one is familiar with using the ASCII importing facility in
Jigsaw it might be easier than it looks. I've always found it easier
to do do 'string manipulation' in a home made program to make the
Jigsaw files.

Feel free to email any data files if you think it might help at any
stage. If any data is private it can be anonymised in any way.
My email address has the prefix 'raymur' followed by what is showing
on Google for my email.

It might also pay at this stage to dream up your own ideal solution
for looking at this apogee-perigree question, or whether you may not
pursue it at all in future if this current observation doesn't pan
out.

Ray

[xl...@sympatico.ca]

Ray and Graham,

Sorry I didn't see this thread earlier. I am not familiar with any of
the programs mentioned (I roll my own in Forth) but if a program has
the Black Moon it shouldn't be hard to research lunar perigees and
apogees. Conjunct Black Moon = apogee; opposite Black Moon = perigee.
For this purpose the so-called "True" Black Moon might be preferable,
but for a slight loss in accuracy you have very simple mathematics
with the mean Black Moon.

What steps lead us to conclude that there are geophysical reasons for
the correlation between lunar distance and birth rates?

Axel

[xl...@sympatico.ca]

I should have been more precise: Moon conjunct Black Moon = Moon at
apogee; Moon opposite Black Moon = Moon at perigee. The result is
always approximate (even with the "True" BM) but good enough for
statistics, because one has to take an area around the exact point
anyway.

[Graham Douglas]

Hi Axel and Ray,
                         I settled for a hand made mean perigee in the end, for simplicity but also because probably the theory uses it too.
           Briefly the moon and sun cause variations in the earths magnetic field which are tiny compared to the main field but are known to be detectable by a variety of organisms. Gauquelin looked at the effects of solar storms on the field which are much larger , but they also tend to disappear when the sun goes into a very quiet phase every few hundred years so they wouldn't be so likely as ways for us to have tuned into these variations during evolution.
         At the moment I am trying to use the many features of the moons motion (which are registered in its effect on the field) as a way of looking at the gauquelin data to see if there is a case for saying that birth frequencies might be after all influenced by the magnetic field.
      I say 'after all' because after the first experiment in which the Gauquelins appeared to have found very good evidence for such influence on the heredity of planetary positions their replications were mostly unsuccessful. The question was then assumed to have been settled by other investigators (well mostly professor Ertel, (who has done a lot of other good stuff) and the ever caustic Geoffrey Dean).
    I can send you a copy of part 1 of my article on this in Correlation, (Ray's is in the post) either by post or email if you like. It is mostly a review of research on the geomagnetic field as it might affect astrological research.
     The theory behind these variations will be given in more detail in part 2 which I am working on now.
       Regards,
            Graham.
        
       

[Ray Murphy]

RM: I had no idea that the above rule existed but it makes sense of
course because the moon would ~have~ to be pretty close to the mean
lunar apogee longitude (or BML).
Now I'm wondering about the sort of iteration that would be needed to
find those approximate conjunctions and oppositions..

Ray

[xl...@sympatico.ca]

On Apr 6, 3:08 pm, Graham Douglas <ondastropic...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

[ ... ]

Yes, I would certainly like to see this article. If you can send it by
email to ax {{at}} hirsig.ca it will be most gratefully received. I
have been gathering similar things myself - more of a random
collection of broad hints - and if your work doesn't completely put me
to shame I might send you some of the references.

Axel