Planetary nodes at astro.com
Alois Treindl
They have since a while been available as a special funktion in Swiss Ephemeris
but this was only accessible to programmers who develop their own astrological
applications.
Now I have added a feature to the 'swetest' utility which can be called online
at the Swiss Ephemeris test page http://www.astro.ch/swisseph/swetest.htm
By changing the output format parameter to -f PLNn on the test page, for each
planet the ecliptic longitude of the ascending osculating and mean node will be
listed, if this value is available.
More information can be found in the guestbook, or in the online Swiss Ephemeris
documentation.
The downloadable version of the test utility, swetest.exe, does not yet contain
the extended feature.
By the way, recently we have also added a midpoint feature to swetest.
It allows to compute midpoints for arbitrary pairs of planets and to output them
in tabular format, which can then be loaded - for example - into Excel, to
create a graphic midpoint ephemeris.
--
|| Alois Treindl, Astrodienst AG, mailto:al...@astro.com
|| Zollikon/Zurich, Switzerland
|| Free astrological charts at http://www.astro.com/
|| SWISS EPHEMERIS Free Edition at http://www.astro.com/swisseph/
SeaGtGruff
> Someone requested from us to make planetary nodes available.
>
> They have since a while been available as a special funktion in Swiss
> Ephemeris but this was only accessible to programmers who develop
> their own astrological applications.
>
> Now I have added a feature to the 'swetest' utility which can be called
> online at the Swiss Ephemeris test page
> http://www.astro.ch/swisseph/swetest.htm
I think that's great!
> By changing the output format parameter to -f PLNn on the test page,
> for each planet the ecliptic longitude of the ascending osculating and
> mean node will be listed, if this value is available.
>
> More information can be found in the guestbook, or in the online Swiss
> Ephemeris documentation.
>
> The downloadable version of the test utility, swetest.exe, does not yet
> contain the extended feature.
I love swetest.exe, so I hope you post a message here as soon as the extended
feature becomes available in the downloadable version!
> By the way, recently we have also added a midpoint feature to swetest.
> It allows to compute midpoints for arbitrary pairs of planets and to
> output them in tabular format, which can then be loaded - for example -
> into Excel, to create a graphic midpoint ephemeris.
Are you saying this is part of the downloadable swetest.exe program? I have
the first version, I think, and never thought to check for newer ones.
I don't care what anyone else may say-- I think Astrodienst is marvelous, and I
sincerely appreciate all the work that you and everyone else there put into it.
It just keeps getting better and better! I'm sure it's a labor of love for
you!
Michael Rideout
Alois Treindl
> > By the way, recently we have also added a midpoint feature to swetest.
> > It allows to compute midpoints for arbitrary pairs of planets and to
> > output them in tabular format, which can then be loaded - for example -
> > into Excel, to create a graphic midpoint ephemeris.
>
> Are you saying this is part of the downloadable swetest.exe program? I have
> the first version, I think, and never thought to check for newer ones.
no, the midpoints I also added only this week. Currently they work only on the
online test page, but even there you can easily catch the output into a text
file and feed it to Excel.
Dieter Koch, our programmer who usually maintains Swiss Ephemeris including the
swetest utility is on vacation, and I added the new features myself,
and put them onto the online test page version.
I did not dare yet to place the modified swetest.c and swetest.exe into the
ftp download area because there were also changes in swephlib.c where I found
some new experimental features by Dieter which seemed incomplete, and which I
did not understand as they were undocumented.
I rather wait for Dieter to complete his stuff, and publish what will probably
be a new minor release of the whole Swiss Ephemeris package, instead of make a
potentially unstable version available for download.
Putting a new 'experimental' version on the website to execute is a different
matter because there we have it still under complete control and can fix it
quickly
should it turn out to be buggy. it is impossible to 'withdraw' a release however
once it has been downloaded, and therefore we are much more quality conscious
for code which goes into download than for code which is just made to run on the
web server.
Thanks for your comment, by the way. Yes, Swiss Ephemeris is a work of love.
swetest.exe is of course no real astrology application, it is just a 'test
program
for Swiss Ephemeris', demonstrating what can be done with it by a programmer
with very few and simple function calls. But yes, it is useful, and
particularily combined with something like Excel it can be used very creatively.
SeaGtGruff
> no, the midpoints I also added only this week. Currently they work only
> on the online test page, but even there you can easily catch the output
> into a text file and feed it to Excel.
Okay, I'll check out the web page version.
I did go to the Astrodienst site to check, and there were newer versions of
both the swetest.exe and swewin32.exe programs than the versions I have. I
also saw that there is a mailing list for the Swiss Ephemeris. I've downloaded
the newest swetest.zip and swewin32.zip, and subscribed to the mailing list.
[snip]
> swetest.exe is of course no real astrology application, it is just a 'test
> program for Swiss Ephemeris', demonstrating what can be done with it
> by a programmer with very few and simple function calls. But yes, it is
> useful, and particularily combined with something like Excel it can be
> used very creatively.
Yes, one of the things I like about it is its great flexibility and the
creative ways it can be used.
Michael Rideout
John A. Halloran
>Someone requested from us to make planetary nodes available.
>They have since a while been available as a special funktion in Swiss Ephemeris
>but this was only accessible to programmers who develop their own astrological
>applications.
>Now I have added a feature to the 'swetest' utility which can be called online
>at the Swiss Ephemeris test page http://www.astro.ch/swisseph/swetest.htm
>By changing the output format parameter to -f PLNn on the test page, for each
>planet the ecliptic longitude of the ascending osculating and mean node will be
>listed, if this value is available.
Readers should be aware that the Swiss Ephemeris is calculating the so-called
Geocentric planetary nodes instead of the Heliocentric planetary nodes. In
the documentation for AstrolDeluxe, which calculates both types of planetary
nodes, I have written that the calculation for the Geocentric nodes combines
apples with oranges by combining the earth's orbital plane not with the planes
of the other planets' orbits but with the circles of their orbits.
It is very sophisticated of your company to do the osculating as well as the
mean node, although the difference is considerably less than a degree
for all planets. What argument is different? I see that the heliocentric
node is a major argument - does that contribute the osculating component?
Regards,
-------------------------------------------
John Halloran, Halloran Software
P.O. Box 75713, Los Angeles, CA 90075 U.S.A.
http://www.halloran.com/
e-mail: sea...@primenet.com
Alois Treindl
>
> Readers should be aware that the Swiss Ephemeris is calculating the so-called
> Geocentric planetary nodes instead of the Heliocentric planetary nodes. I
I am afraid you are not right, John; you should have read chapter 5 of the
'Programmer's documentation of the Swiss Ephemeris' before you talked.
We tend to think a little before we put something into the Swiss Ephemeris
(check the chapter about the sidereal zodiac, for example).
The function swe_nod_aps() computes whatever you want, geocentric, heliocentric,
barycentric nodes and apsides depending on the request you make.
The Swiss Ephemeris test utility swetest does the same, when you add the special
option -hel, it will do heliocentric, and with -bary it will do barycentric
calculation.
--
|| Alois Treindl, Astrodienst AG, mailto:al...@astro.com
|| Zollikon/Zurich, Switzerland
Alois Treindl
> I have written that the calculation for the Geocentric nodes combines
> apples with oranges by combining the earth's orbital plane not with the planes
> of the other planets' orbits but with the circles of their orbits.
I think it perfectly legitimate to compute a planetary node in a geocentric
perspective. The node of a planet is the point where it crosses the ecliptic.
It is a point in space as good as any other, and I can look at if from Earth and
will see it in a certain direction, or I can look at it from the Sun, and see it
in another direction, or I can look at it from the solar system's barycenter,
and see it in yet another direction.
Apples and oranges are fruit, and I do not understand where they come into this
matter. They have the same shape as planets, roughly, but usually they do not
orbit.
Aren't you confusing something here?
> It is very sophisticated of your company to do the osculating as well as the
> mean node, although the difference is considerably less than a degree
> for all planets. What argument is different? I see that the heliocentric
> node is a major argument - does that contribute the osculating component?
Osculating orbital elements are always derived by pretending that the path of a
celestial body is an ellipse; from a few points of the current path one derives
the
set of orbital elements. Because in reality the path is disturbed by interaction
with
other celestial bodies besides the central body, you will get different
osculating elements at different times during an orbit.
Mean orbital elements are derived from a mean theory of the celestial body's
motion.
For most celestial bodies however there are no mean theories; they exist only
for
the planets Mercury to Neptune because they were discovered before the
availability of fast digital computers. Since about 1950 planetary orbits are
computed by direct numeric integration of their motion; the tedious task of
developing a mean theory which took years for each planet can be saved. This is
why we canot offer the mean node for Pluto or any of the asteroids.
John A. Halloran
>"John A. Halloran" wrote:
>> I have written that the calculation for the Geocentric nodes combines
>> apples with oranges by combining the earth's orbital plane not with the planes
>> of the other planets' orbits but with the circles of their orbits.
>I think it perfectly legitimate to compute a planetary node in a geocentric
>perspective. The node of a planet is the point where it crosses the ecliptic.
>It is a point in space as good as any other, and I can look at if from Earth and
>will see it in a certain direction, or I can look at it from the Sun, and see it
>in another direction, or I can look at it from the solar system's barycenter,
>and see it in yet another direction.
>Apples and oranges are fruit, and I do not understand where they come into this
>matter. They have the same shape as planets, roughly, but usually they do not
>orbit.
>Aren't you confusing something here?
In English we have the expression 'comparing apples to oranges', which means
comparing things that cannot legitimately be compared because they fall into
different classes. So it is with the plane of the earth's orbit and the
circles of the planets' orbits. This is why I said 'the so-called Geocentric
nodes'. It is very important for astrologers to have a clear understanding of
nodes because they are central to astrology - for example, the start of the
tropical zodiac is defined by the intersection of the ecliptic plane with the
plane of the earth's celestial equator. Here is what I wrote in the
AstrolDeluxe documentation:
"The Heliocentric Planetary Nodes are the positions when the nodes are
considered as lines of intersection between the earth's orbital plane and the
planetary orbital planes which reach out to infinity. The Geocentric
Planetary Nodes are the positions when the nodes are considered to be the
points where the orbit ellipse of each planet crosses the earth's extended
orbital plane. The geocentric node points may sound like the result of
comparing apples and oranges; in fact, Carl Payne Tobey and his students have
found the heliocentric node positions to be the effective positions (Astrology
of Inner Space, chapter 23). The Heliocentric Nodes are therefore the default.
Information from AstrolDeluxe ReportWriter Help file, © 1993-1998 Halloran
Software."
The command that you told newsgroup readers to run produced the so-called
Geocentric planetary nodes. By making these the default, you are promoting
calculations that at least to me are meaningless, thereby turning the new
astrologer away from the study of planetary nodes. But astrologers should
not ignore the planetary nodes because the positions of the heliocentric
planetary nodes in the chart are real power points.
In addition to Carl Payne Tobey's students, the American
astronomically-oriented astrologer Michael Munkasey uses the heliocentric
planetary nodes. Have any astrologers out there found any meaningful results
from the so-called Geocentric nodes?
Alois, all the other nodes that astrologers use are the lines of intersection
between planes. Can you think of any that are not?