Lunarium Blog

Perhaps the best way to figure out someone's Moon Sign is to use a free online horoscope calculator. There are a few of them available, and they do all the calculations that would otherwise be performed by a professional astrological software. These calculators simplify the job as much as possible. The main benefits of using them are: They make use of the high precision astronomical algorithms (in fact, the same algorithms as those used by my Moon Sign Calculator ). They use a state-of-the-art database of geographical locations and time zone changes — something that my Moon Sign Calculator cannot offer). So these calculators provide the highest possible precision, in terms of time and space. They provide a lot more than just the Moon Sign. You will also get your Ascending Sign, the precise position of your Sun, and many, many other things. They typically provide an interpretation for various astrological factors. These wonderful tools have a few downsides too. The main of ...

I created this calculator several years ago, with the aim to make finding out one's Moon Sign as easy as possible. Since then, the Moon Sign Calculator became very popular: about 10,000 unique visitors use it daily. The strengths of this calculator are: It uses the state-of-the-art astronomical algorithms to calculate the position of the Moon. Most professional astrological programs use the same algorithms. When a person who had a doubt whether the Moon Sign Calculator's result was precise enough gave me her birth details, I calculated her chart using Solar Fire and then compared the position of the Moon in that chart with the result of my calculator. The results were exactly the same.  It is very easy to use. You just need to enter the date and the time of birth, as well as specify the time zone where you were born. The calculator will make all the necessary adjustments and corrections and give you the position of the Moon at your birth with the minute-of-the-arc prec...

I received an email from a person who stated that different sources give her at least three different versions of her Moon Sign, so she was confused. I asked her what those sources were, and she answered that the first of them was a book. That book offered a very simple approach: "you look up your date of birth, and your Moon Sign is listed next to it". If you have a book like that, please do not trust it. The situation with the moon signs is a bit more complex than that. The Moon can change sign at any moment during a particular day, and so to find out in which sign it was at the moment of birth you need to take into account both the time of birth and the time zone of the location where the person was born. Let's consider an example. I have a book by David Wells titled "Your Astrological Moon Sign. Werewolf, Angel, Vampire, Saint? Discover Your Hidden Inner Self". This book offers Moon Tables that were designed to help the reader to find out his or her Moon...

In a very old post on using the information about the Moon's phase and sign to choose a time to cut hair , I followed the same approach that would be appropriate in gardening. Indeed, the way how hair grows is, in terms of biological evolution, similar to the way how plants grow. Now, however, I found an additional information in a medieval astrological manuscript from the collection of Elias Ashmole. To be able to use this information, you need to know what the Mansions of the Moon are . You will also need to use the Universal Lunar Calendar , set up for your location. Here is the list of the mansions from the Ashmole 396 manuscript that are related to cutting the hair, in one or another way: Mansion 1: "Cut your hair and your nails". Mansion 5: "Wash your head, shear your hair". Mansion 7: "Shear your hair and wash your head, wear new clothes". Mansion 9: "Shear not your hair". Mansion 11: "Shear your hair if you will". ...

Right now, I am working on iLuna for Android. It so happened, historically, that the Android version was a bit simpler than the iPhone one (well, at the time I created it, Android was still in version 1, and there was one and only Android phone in the whole world). It offers all the same information, but, perhaps most significantly, it's missing the Month view that allows to see at a glance the whole month, and to navigate by a month at a time. So the first thing I am going to do is to bring iLuna for Android to the same level of user interface sophistication where iLuna for iPhone is right now. The next task is internationalisation (i18n). That's something I should have done years ago, simply because Russian is my first language, and I could easily do a Russian translation myself. So I did it, for the current Android app, but I haven't applied it to the iPhone one yet. I've also got a Korean translation, but I still need to implement it in both apps. Why exactly K...

iLuna was the first smartphone app I ever created. The iPhone version of it was released to the App Store in February 2009, while the Android version was released in the end of the same year. Since then, thousands of people became the users of iLuna, many of them use the app on a daily basis. In fact, it is the most popular of my apps. All my attempts to create something that would be at least as popular as iLuna weren't successful. With all the previous updates to the mobile platform, from iPhone SDK 2.0 to iOS 7, from Android 1.0 to Android KitKat 4.4.4, iLuna just kept working. It was good, because all those thousands of users could rely on the app. But it also gave me an opportunity to delay the updates. Some of those updates were requested by users long time ago, like, for example, the possibility of exporting information from iLuna into a calendar. The app wasn't even updated for the bigger iPhone 5 screen, so it wasn't using the whole screen on the newer devices. ...