oroboros 20080712

Astrology software

Oroboros is an astrology software written in Python. It is based on the following modules:

• AstroDienst’s Swiss Ephemeris (pyswisseph) version >= 1.74.00-0

• Olson timezones (pytz)

• Qt toolkit (PyQt4) version >= 4.3

Optionally:

• Docutils version = 0.5

• Mercurial (for distant charts repositories)

• Supybot (for IRC plugin)

What’s new?

• Usual bug fixes

• Additional asteroids: Eris, Sedna, Quaoar, Nessus, Varuna

Features

• Charts: natal/radix, transits, progression, harmonics, profection

• Open Astrolog or Skylendar charts too

• Save charts as images in various formats (png, jpg, bmp, svg,…)

• Query the online GeoNames.org atlas database

• Calculates all planets, nodes

• More than 300 fixed stars

• Asteroids (Eris, Quaoar, Sedna, etc)

• Uses Swiss, JPL, or Moshier Ephemeris

• A flexible and powerfull configuration system

• Geocentric, topocentric, heliocentric or barycentric charts

• Various house systems, including Gauquelin sectors

• Tropical or sidereal zodiacs

• Midpoints calculations and drawings

• Format comments with Docutils reStructured Text

• Synchronize your charts with a distant repository (using Mercurial)

• A few toys for IRC chat addicts (Supybot plugin)

• And easy extension capabilities with the Python language…

Oroboros manual

Installation

Download and install the package and the required modules (most of them are available in your distro repositories). For example, uncompress the latest source package of Oroboros with tar jxf oroboros-xxxxxxxx.tar.bz2, then cd oroboros-xxxxxxxx, finally (with super-user permission) type python setup.py install.

Ephemeris files

You should also install the compressed ephemeris data files on your system (/usr/local/share/swisseph looks like a good idea). These files are freely distributed on AstroDienst public FTP server.

A simple installation would require that you download the following files, allowing calculations over the period from 1800 to 2399:

• sepl_18.se1

• semo_18.se1

• seas_18.se1

• fixstars.cat

• seorbel.txt

You can also grab the following asteroids files (other asteroids can be implemented on demand):

• 136199 Eris

• 7066 Nessus

• 50000 Quaoar

• 90377 Sedna

• 20000 Varuna

• 128 Nemesis

Usage

If everything goes well you will be able to start the application by typing oroboros in your shell.

First steps

Update the configuration settings, especially the path to ephemeris files. You may also create an aspects filter and an orbs filter for the midpoints settings, otherwise you’ll have some surprises.

Download