Starlight Research Question
Written on January 8, 2008 by Bernadette
Hullo Everyone,
I received a really good set of questions from a person asking about Starlight and I am sharing the answers here because others may be interested.
The questions were about doing research in Starlight - my replies are in italics and I have put a screen shot of the research screen so you can see the options.
Click on this image to make bigger. When you do you will notice that I have already added some types of quesitions for Starlight to scan its databases for charts that fit those criteria.
Starlight searches, using and/or boolean operators, a data base. Most research programs function in this way in that firstly the data is generated by the software and then queries are sent to that data base.
Now with normal astrology programs this data base is either supplied by the Swiss Ephemeris or in charts that the person has created themselves. Starlight has the same capablities.
Can different types of search’s be done to find either locations, paran’s or times of events.
All of the above, any name, place, date, paran time, star phase, star on angle, heliacal rising or setting or any other phase all with the boolean operator of and/or.
Can I just give my latitude and longitude and receive all the different configurations of star and planet for a specific period of time, say a week or month etc?
If you create the data base first. In other words if you create a set of charts for every day for a year for your long and latitude you can ask Starlight to generate that set of charts into a data base and then you can seach it.
Can I give the parans planet and star’s angles I want and have the program give me back a time and place, preferable in Latitude and Longitude for such a event?
Once again if you create a database then you can search it. For this question you would need to produce a set of charts for a range of latitudes and longitudes, over a set of dates and then generate the database and then search.
Can I give a Time and get back latitude\longitude and the paran of star and planet.
I am not too sure what you are asking here. You can search a data base by a date, not a time in terms of a 24 hour clock - If you just search for a date Starlight would give you all charts for that date - if you asked for a date plus star and planet paran then you could get all charts for that date with that paran, and if you added latitude and or longitude that would further reduce the search.
Just in case you also need to know - Starlight uses the swiss epheremis so its date range is from 5,500 BCE to 5, 500 CE
What I can see from your questions you would like Starlight to have a automatic chart generating feature which would create a set of charts within a range of dates or latidues which you could then search. This is a good idea but at the moment you would need to create the charts one at a time in Starlight or generate them in Jigsaw (an astrological research program that does automatically create databases). Then you could do all the searches that you wish.
Now this set of questions got me thinking and I have created a 10 year ephemeris in Jigsaw ( an astrological research program) for latitudes ranging from 52N to 50South and I have imported it into Starlight. If I am happy with it I will export it as an ASCII file and put it up on the Starlight web site Starlight users to download and also use for research.
I will do a post here on the blog, if and when I put that up.
thank you
Bernadette Brady
