Building the Perfect Chart

[divineorder]

Some of you wanted more detail on chart construction-and I also realized that by simply covering the Planets, Signs, Elements, etc. that that was enough for the thread.

Building a chart:

When's your birthday? Usually, we in the West know, but not always (If you are an adoptee, the practice for a long time was to give you as a birthday a new birth certificate wih your date of adoption, with the adoptive parents as parents. Another reason to support open records)

What time were you born? If you were born after 1950, you were most likely born in a hospital, which has records, and who recorded the time on the birth certificate. If the time is not on the certificate, check your hospital records from the hospital where you were born. Prior to 1950, things are a little more complicated. Some births were in a hospital, some weren't. Those that weren't may still have a birthtime if the practitioner recorded it on the birth certificate, the time was recorded in a family bible. Even some newspapers may have the time if it was an eventful birth.

Where were you born? Again, if you were part of your family of origin, you have at least a County.

[divineorder]

1. The right time

Well, you have a time. But the recorded time may not be the correct celestial time. There is a matter, if you have a summer birthday, of Daylight Savings Time. If you were born after 1967, Daylight Savings Time was standardized in the United States except for some parts of Indiana and the state of Arizona. Check dates and subtract one hour to get the correct local time. Another caveat: during the Energy Crisis, (1972 or so), Daylight Savings Time ran all year round, so check those dates if you were born in the early 70's.

World War Two babies (9/1/39-9/30/45)
need to check for War Time. While War Time in the United States wasn't observed until we actually declared war, other nations such as Great Britain observed Summer Time and even Double Summer Time. The rationale was that by pushing sunset till much later in the day, we could conserve energy and make it harder for bombers to use the cover of darkness. Pilots have to sleep too, and having to wait until 10 pm or greater to even start flying would be a greater problem than if they could start at 8pm and finish by 4 am, a time when few observers would be on the streets.

There was even some Daylight Savings Time during WWI as well.

Between the Wars and before 1967, Daylight Savings Time was a local phenomenon, so check a good reference like Time Changes in the United States, or Time Changes in the World.

If you find that this is the case, be sure to subtract at least one hour from the recorded time, or in the case of Double Summer Time, two.

This gets you to the correct time zone time. How do you get to the correct celestial time? Next post...

[divineorder]

2. Correct Celestial Time

If you have an emphemeris (American Ephemeris, online ephemeris, whatever). An ephemeris is a list of planets places recorded at an observed time. The observed time is usually Noon or Midnight at Greenwich, England, 0 Longitude (The lines that divide the earth into degrees East and West. Greenwich is the dividing line). Unless you live in or near Greenwich, the listed times are earlier or later than your actual time, so corrections need to be made. If your birth place is west of this, you need to add the number of hours in order to get the time at Greenwich, east (as in Paris), subtract.

If you don't, everything else will be too early or too late to be accurate.

[Eloriel]

3. This is all very good info, but I don't quite understand why you're

going into this. Are you going to teach people here to erect their own charts? Plenty of practicing professional astrologers might have trouble doing that. I learned once upon a time, but thankfully computerized charts came out almost immediately.

These days, ALL chart calculation software and even the ones online like at www.astro.com (which I use) figures all that in. It's nice to KNOW about, but I don't quite understand your emphasis on this.

I do love your threads, and look forward to more -- and to participating here and there, as I have something productive to say (which may not actually apply to THIS post, but still...)

[divineorder]

4. One reason I'm doing this is to establish

Eloriel:

The basis for actually reading the chart and making sure that you get the correct data for it. And not everyone has chart software, and sometimes even that has a glitch. For example, if you get a chart that has Sun in the Third House at 9:30 pm, it's definitely in error, even if a computer produced it!

And some people don't quite understand about Daylight Savings Time either, or see a GMT Time for a celestial event and can't interpret it so that they can convert it to their local time.

If you know chart mechanics, you can eventually do horary or even rectification.

[divineorder]

5. Well, You Have A Time

The hospital records have been found, or you dug up that old birth certificate and really looked at it. A few of you younger readers have found that old VCR tape of your birth, and got the time.

Now to convert that into the Greenwich equivalent so that the planets are at the right places when you were born. Since Greenwich is East, it is later than American clock times. If you were born in Nova Scotia, add 4 hours to the clock time. New York, 5, Chicago 6, Denver, 7, San Franscisco,8. Hawaii/Alaska about 11 hours earlier than Greenwich. Think of it as the way you watch television. TV shows are usually broadcast according to Eastern Standard Time, which is the latest time for the United States, Central Time, an hour later. Those same broadcasts are saved to be shown at the equivalent time in the Mountain and Pacific. If they were shown live all over, prime time would start at 5pm on the West Coast!

The Academy Awards, shown live, show an afternoon affair because while it's 5 in L.A, it's 8 in New York. And a sadder example the other way: Diana's funeral. To get up and watch it here you had to get up at about 3 am because the time of the funeral was about 8 or 9 am. It's noon there and 7 am here.

Do you know that Time Zones came about because of the railroad? Before the railroad, traffic moved so slowly that each place could rely on local Solar Time. But with the coming of the railroad, with its transcontinental swing and the speed, relying on Local Time played havoc with coordinating departures. So Time Zones were invented. All departures that were in the same time zone would be on the same time: outside, you could add or subtract an hour in order to arrive at the agreed-upon time.

And the dividing lines are Greenwich, in England, and the International Date Line. It is officially a new day in the West when it's midnight in Greenwich. Any place west of that is still the previous day. Any place east (like Paris) is later in the Morning.