Lunarium Blog

I just responded to an email, and I thought the topic and the questions were so common that I should share them here. First of all, many people believe that whereas Western astrology uses the signs of the zodiac, which are equal 30-degree sections of the ecliptic, Vedic astrology uses actual constellations. This is wrong: Vedic astrology also uses a zodiac made of equal 30-degree signs, but it uses the sidereal zodiac. The difference is in the starting point. The tropical zodiac used in Western astrology starts from the point of the vernal equinox, which is easily defined astronomically, and so tropical zodiac is well established, clear and unambiguous. In contrast, there are several different opinions regarding the starting point of the sidereal zodiac. The difference between these two zodiacs is called Ayanamsha, and there are several different Ayanamshas in use by different astrologers. The most popular and, as far as I know, officially approved in India is Lahiri Ayanamsha. T...

In my Lunarium Newsletter , I usually announce to my subscribers that a period of retrograde motion of a personal planet (Mercury, Venus, or Mars) is approaching. I point out the dates and then provide links to various resources about the retrograde motion, how it is understood from the astrological viewpoint. However, as retrograde motion happens every now and then, especially that of Mercury, I am becoming repetitive, and I have to copy and paste the same links from newsletter to newsletter again and again. To avoid such repetitions, I decided to create this post, and in it to bring together all the essential links related to the retrograde motion of the personal planets. Now in my newsletters, I will be able to only provide one link, to this post, and if new sources of information will appear, I will only need to update this one post. So things should become much easier! General Information on Retrograde Planets These links point to the sources of information about the re...

Almost two years passed since I self-published my book, DIY Astrology: Discover the Main Phases of Your Life . The book is doing reasonably well but I wasn't happy about the fact that I offered the readers to do some clumsy manipulations with a calendar to figure out the main phases of their lives. This wasn't in the spirit of Lunarium. Lunarium makes things easy. Normally, you just need to press a button, and everything gets calculated for you. Now the same can also be said about the main phases of one's life, as I created a special online calculator exactly for this purpose . So what are you waiting for? Go find out when you are going to have that glorious progressed Full Moon!

I was looking into numerology of Apple Inc. recently and found something very interesting. Let's start from Steve Jobs. He was born on February 24, 1955, therefore his Life Path, which is the numerological sum of the date of birth, is 1. Next, Apple was founded on April 1, 1976. So its Life Path is 1. The number 1 was very strong on that date, as it was also the day number. It was then incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc., on January 3, 1977. This new date also gives the Life Path 1. Later, the company was renamed to Apple Inc. on January 9, 2007, and again the numerological sum of the date is 1. Finally, Tim Cook, the current Apple CEO, was born on November 1, 1960. Believe it or not, but his Life Path number is 1 too, as well as his Birthday number. Now, here is what Hans Decoz wrote in his book about number 1: "The 1 is the most independent, unconventional, and individualistic of all numbers. It represents the beginning, the source, the innovator, the originato...

This book is a result of my experiment. I decided to try and simplify secondary progression (a method of prediction used by probably most professional astrologers) to such a degree that it could be used by everyone, and still delivered a good amount of useful information. I first shared the idea in one of the issues of the Lunarium Newsletter and asked the readers to try the approach and tell me if it made sense for them. Several people responded that they found the method interesting and useful, so I went ahead and produced a whole book describing the approach and giving detailed examples. The book is now available for free on the US and UK Amazon stores (from the 7th of May for 5 days), and for a minimal possible price in all the other stores. I am planning to keep it at that low price for a couple of weeks from now, as a promotion. Here are the links to the book on the different stores: US Store UK Store DE Store FR Store ES Store IT Store NL Store JP Store BR ...

When I initially implemented the Moon Sign Calculator , I created a time zone selector that would allow to choose pretty much any time zone of those provided by the computing platform. You could choose a region, and then any time zone within that region. Technically, that was a superior solution. The system of time zones in the world is quite complex, a lot more complex than it is commonly assumed, especially when taking into account historical changes. Therefore, even if you had to spend some time to figure out which time zone was the most appropriate for you, the result could be the most precise, within the limitations of the platform. However, that solution proved to be very user-unfriendly. Many visitors, looking at the time zone selector, either were simply puzzled by it, or decided that they need to find their precise birth place in the list. For example, if they were born in Mumbai, they would not be satisfied by the time zone Asia/Kolkata, even though the whole India shares...

First of all an important note : You don't need to own a Kindle device to own and read Kindle books. If you have any computer, or smartphone, or tablet, there is a free Kindle app for it (you will easily find it by making a Google search for "Kindle app"). Just download and install such an app for your particular platform — and you are ready to read Kindle books. I have published a Kindle book that explains pretty much everything there is to know about the void-of-course Moon periods. I start from the history of the concept and show that the void-of-course Moon was known and used in astrology at least a thousand years ago. I then explain step-by-step what a void-of-course period is. The explanation is a little bit tedious but if you'll manage it, you'll know precisely the mechanics of this phenomenon. Finally, I explain a number of ways how you can find out dates and times of void-of-course periods, and how you can use the knowledge in your daily life. Her...

I found this very interesting approach in the book by Kennet Gillman, One After Another . Before attempting to find out an unknown time of birth, the first step is to figure out whether the person was born at day or at night. At day means after the sunrise and before sunset, at night, correspondingly, when the Sun was below the horizon. The criterium is very simple, and in my experience it proves to be quite reliable. Here is the idea: those who were born at day usually have a very important, life changing event at some point from the age of 18 to the age of 19 . Theoretically, it should be at the age of 18 1/4, but in practice it can be a little bit before or after that precise age. On the other hand, those who were born at night usually have a similarly very important, life changing event between the ages of 24 and 25 . Again, the precise theoretical age of the event is 24 1/4. If you are interested in the theory behind the use of these specific numbers, please refer to Kennet G...

First of all, if you do have some idea of what your time of birth could be , like, you were born in the morning or in the evening, or around lunch time, then simply take the approximate middle of the interval (say, 9am for a morning birth). Calculate the Moon Sign using the Moon Sign Calculator (or, if you prefer, a natal chart calculator ). Pay attention to the degree of the Moon (the Moon Sign Calculator always shows the degree, like so: Degree: 10° 29'). If it's not within the first two degrees of the sign (from 0º to 2º) and not within the last two degrees of the sign (from 28º to 29º 59'), then you can be quite sure that the sign defined by the calculator is indeed your Moon Sign. If the degree is within the first or the last two degrees of the sign then you will need to have a better idea of you birth time to have any certainty regarding your Moon Sign. In some cases, you might be able to compare the descriptions of the two neighbouring signs and decide which of th...

I just received an email saying that there is something wrong with Lunarium: the home page shows that the Moon is in Pisces. That, obviously, can't be the case, I mean, the Moon can't be in Pisces, as the Sun is now in Aquarius, and the Moon is full. So the Moon has to be in Leo, the sign opposite to Aquarius. I went to Lunarium , and the Moon was indeed in Leo. So what happened, why another visitor saw it in Pisces? I receive emails with similar complaints from time to time, and the reason for the problem is caching . It can happen in a few different places, from the user's web browser to some server on the Internet through which the request and the response pass between the user and Lunarium. The nature of the problem is that the Internet (including all those bits from which it is made) wants to please you by all means, and for that to deliver each and every page you request as quickly as possible. Since many pages on the internet do not change every minute, web browser...

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. ...

In my Moon Sign book , I've written the following: The ruler of Libra Venus gives the Moon-in-Libra people a great natural appreciation of the beauty of the surrounding world, and since Libra is an Air sign, they feel an urge to somehow tell other people about that beauty, to share their adoration of the world. That's why you will find many famous artists who were born with the Moon in Libra. In a different section of the book, I am using an example of Sylvester Stallone as of a typical Moon-in-Libra individual. But it is only now that I've discovered that he is not just a world-famous actor, he is also an artist! His art exhibition in Switzerland a few years ago was entitled "Sylvester Stallone: 35 Years of Painting". I've made quite a number of little discoveries while working on the book, and now, when the book is already finished, I keep making more of them!

This project was the main focus of my efforts over the last half a year. There was a lot of research and gathering data, many ideas waiting to be described properly, and this was also my very first astrological book in English (I do have already two other books published in English but those were about some obscure areas of computer programming). So it was a massive effort. Finally, the book is available and is waiting for its readers. I made sure that the paperback version is available, and it is printed on a cream paper, which I think is very appropriate for the topic of the book - it resembles the colour of the moonlight. I tried to keep the book as affordable as possible, but on-demand printing isn't cheap. Anyway, if you, like myself, still like paper books, you can get a paper version of my Moon Sign book here: The book will also be available, or is already available, for all the major eReader platforms. You can get it right now for: Kindle Kobo It should app...

I just posted an article on Lunarium on how to understand the void-of-course Moon , and here is a good example for it. Friday the 10th of May was almost a whole day void-of-course period here in London. The company I currently work for has submitted an iPhone app to Apple for approval right in the middle of the day.  It would look very ridiculous if I tried to warn them. Programmers are the worst people when it comes to intangible matters (except of me of course! J).  I also submitted an app on the same day, a new version of the Moon Sign , but I did that late in the evening, after the Moon has entered Gemini.  And here is the result. My app was approved unexpectedly quickly, while the company's app was rejected.  Do you still not believe in the importance of void-of-course periods?

Finally, I have written an article which properly, and avoiding technical terms, explains what is the Void-of-Course Moon, how the knowledge of it should be used, and offers an interesting and informative story about how President Reagan used Void-of-Course Moon in his career. You will find the new article here: About the Void-of-Course Moon .