Lunarium Blog

Did you know that there is a recent update to this blog post available? More on Cutting Hair With The Moon . This is a popular search which brings people to Lunarium, but I couldn't figure out yet where to put this information, so for the moment I will provide a brief answer right here. The question is: how to use the information about the Moon to decide when to cut hair? Of course you know that to get the information about the Moon you can use either the Online Lunar Calendar or its Downloadable Version . As a matter of fact, I do use this information myself to decide when to cut hair. A few years ago I have noticed that my hair is becoming thinner, and the perspective to get a bald spot didn't seem too attractive to me. Since then I am getting my hair cut on the growing (waxing) Moon only, and the situation has improved considerably. The main idea here is that you want your hair to grow better, cut them when the Moon is increasing in light - i.e. between the New Moo...

One of the consequences of those legal wars between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems is that Windows XP does not have Java support "out-of-the-box". This deficiency is easy to fix: Java Runtime Environment (JRE) can be downloaded for free from Java.Sun.com website (choose JRE 5.0), the latest version "weights" around 16 Mb, and it will make your computer Java-enabled. Now, if you don't have a JRE installed, the following problem will show itself on Windows XP computers. When you try to download the luca.jar file from the Downloads Page , Windows XP automatically renames it to luca.zip, and when you double-click it, as advised, it just shows you the contents of the package - nothing of interest for you. If you want to run this program, remove the luca.zip file, download and install the JRE and then download another copy of Lunar Calendar. This should work well. For the future, I will have to avoid creating Java programs despite of all their benefits.

I have just uploaded a new program - a downloadable version of Lunar Calendar. It provides a verbose description of a day's situation and will be suitable for those who find the table version of Lunar Calendar on the Home page too terse. I have tested the program on my computers, it works fine, but it takes the time zone and DST offset from the computer on which it runs, and if you could test the program in your time zone and see if its output is the same as in the online version (it should be) - that would be great. The program is available on the Downloads page , and it will work on just any computer - Windows, Mac OS, doesn't matter - as soon as it has Java installed.

Bucharest, Fresno CA and Tomsk were added to the list of the cities.

It is already the second person who has reported that there is something wrong with Lunarium: its calculators do not accept a date bigger than 12th. Well, I do appreciate that many of the visitors are coming from the USA where month in a date traditionally goes first, but since this is a British site, I decided to use the date format which I am used to, where the day goes first. And I have clearly marked the fields : 'Day' or 'Month' in order to avoid misunderstanding. Naturally, the field marked 'Month' cannot accept anything bigger than 12. Please be attentive.

My tracking software told me that several people came to Lunarium with a query like this. Since there is no direct answer to this question on the pages of Lunarium at the moment, why can't I give the answer right here, in the blog? To begin with, every planetary day continues from one sunrise to the next sunrise. This means that every planetary day has in it more or less the same amount of time. Although many of us would wish that Venus day was longer :), the reality of life isn't that good. Every planetary day is composed of exactly 24 planetary hours . But planetary hours are different from what we used to think of as hours. If you take the timespan between a sunrise and the consequent sunset, it will be different on different days, right? In the summer, this timespan will be longer than 12 hours, it will be the longest around the 22nd of June. In winter, especially around the 23rd of December this daylight timespan will be much shorter. Now, if you divide this timespan by 1...

A couple of visitors asked me why don't I display more planetary hours - say, for a few coming days - so that they could plan their activities properly. Frankly speaking, this is exactly what I am going to do. Also, I am going to extend the article which can be found at the Planetary Calendar page and explain in details how planetary hours are calculated. However, at the moment I am completing my dissertation and passing the final exams of an MSc programme - you can imagine how busy I am. By the end of May all these distractions should be over and I will resume my work on Lunarium. One more thing about planetary hours. Some visitors (actually, very few) report a problem when viewing planetary hours. In fact, they see some wrong planetary hour displayed. This is easy to check: the first hour after the sunrise is ruled by the same planet which rules that week day. On Mondays the first hour after the sunrise is ruled by the Moon, on Tuesdays - by Mars, on Wednesdays - by Mercury, on...

I do add new cities to the list at the Lunarium, but currently adding a city takes some time, so I usually don't do that immediately. Usually I am waiting until something like four or five requests come and then add four or five cities all together - when I have time. The most recently added cities are Portland, Sarajevo, Springfield and Cincinnati.

As you have definitely noticed, I am not a native English speaker. So my English is comprehensible, but not always correct. With the help of my friends, I am trying to make the texts at Lunarium better. Some of them were already thoroughly edited, others are still in a rather raw form. For example, a half of the texts for the Your Moon Sign feature (those for Moon in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo and Virgo) were already edited, while others weren't. If you find some text which is incomprehensible to you, please let me know and I will try to explain that in a different way. Alternatively, you might suggest a better version of this or that phrase - myself and also all the visitors of Lunarium will be grateful to you.

I decided to create this blog to enable communication with the visitors of the Lunarium.co.uk website. I will use it to explain what is being done at the Lunarium, what is planned, and if there are any questions or problems, this blog should give me an opportunity to answer them. Being under severe workload at the moment, I am unfortunately unable to create any means of communication which would be more integral for the Lunarium. But they might appear over time.