Unsure about my ascendant

Although the title of this thread makes it sound like I am asking for help finding my ascendant, I am actually asking more about which sources to believe. It's about books vs. software.

A lot of websites will attempt to calculate your ascendant for you, but I am personally not sure how accurate these sites are. On the other hand, published books have listings that help find your ascendant and I have noticed that while most sources will claim my ascendant is Sagittarius RIYAL says it's Libra. The Serennu website also says it's Libra.

Do I go with the word of the majority or believe that RIYAL made calculations that even published books didn't do?

Personality-wise, I believe I probably come off more like a Libra ascendant. Even with this in mind, I am just trying to figure out which sources are actually accurate and which ones get my ascendant wrong.

Have you tried running a free chart at Astrodienst? It's an excellent site. You can do it as a guest, or create an account to save you data for quick access on future visits. I'd believe whichever ascendent you get there, which I'd assume would be the same as Riyal. As long as you're entering an accurate clock time and location, it will figure out if there was daylight savings time, etc.

Here's a direct link to the chart w/ Ascendant at astro.com, but they have many others too in the Free Horoscopes section, just FYI.

I just tried that site. I'm not sure how the information differed from how RIYAL calculates things. It may be that I'm somehow putting the wrong information into RIYAL, but that's why I mentioned the Serennu site that also says Libra when I put in the same information. My ascendant is probably Sagittarius, but what gets me is RIYAL is generally viewed as pretty accurate. Unless my settings are off, it should be telling me the correct information.

The site you gave me says my ascendant is Sagittarius. The majority could rule in this situation, except Sagittarius is the one sign I have nothing in common with.

Books vs Software

After 45 years of astrological work I have some opinions on this subject which I can share. Long ago I used tables from books to find my Ascendant or the Ascendant for the person's chart I was setting up. There were times when the result was very close to the start or end of a sign and I then had doubts.

It wasn't very long afterwards, a couple of weeks, that I acquired the several books and other tools needed to accurately hand calculate a chart --- the whole chart, the angles, the Moon and the planets, etc. When I compared what I calculated versus the results from tables I found that sometimes the table were with a few degrees, other times they were very far off the mark.

Differences can be due to the 'time' used; many areas have standard time and daylight savings time in the spring and summer. This can account for an hours worth of error which is 15 degrees. Some hospitals list birth times under standard time and never use daylight savings time, causing another area. Some areas within a country decide that their local time will match a big city's time to the east instead of the time they are supposed to use such as the city that lies to the west of them.

So, great care has to be taken. I use RIYAL and have worked with Juan Revilla to make added features to his software. RIYAL is a very precise astro-software package. However, RIYAL does not have an internal Atlas that will look up and assign longitude or latitude or time zone information for you. Therefore, if you make an error in entering data the resulting chart will be wrong. Most mainstream software packages that have to be purchased to be used will provide very accurate charts.

If you use internet-available software, several problems can arise. Since you don't use the software often, it is possible to easily make entry errors due to the design of the software and the options that are available but not always clearly stated. My advice is to obtain a good, reliable software program that is free and can be downloaded from the program company. There are several available. Halloran from Los Angeles Califronia has a version that is free to use. In this way you will become very familiar with the software and not have to worry about mistakes. Dave

PS, you can always post your chart data here and someone will calculate your chart for you so you will know what your accurate Ascendant is.

As usual, Dave makes some excellent points in a comprehensive answer.

I'm certainly willing to offer my services to check your Ascendant. I'll use more than one program to ensure a complete double check. Just let me know your time of birth, date of birth, and place of birth. You can do that by PM if you don't want to publish it on the forum.

But please don't send me a chart because after all that's the issue in question LOL.

If you want to do it yourself, I'd certainly 'second' his idea of downloading a good freeware or shareware program. Halloran's Astrology for Windows is indeed very good. It does restrict you to a limited number of charts in the completely free version (if all your after is one chart, that's not much of a restriction) but if you're willing to pay the fairly low registration fee ($US 45.00), you get one of the best low cost charting programs out there.

Morinus is a completely free program,

https://sites.google.com/site/pymorinus/

and it does have look up facilities for the latitude and longitude of towns and cities, but its atlas is not as good as Astrology for Windows. So if your error source lies in the co-ordinates you enter, then Morinus might not cure it.

Like Dave, I find most errors come from missing out Daylight Saving, treating PM times as though they were AM or a bad habit I have is to reverse figures, so I might enter 57 degrees, when I should enter 75 degrees. I now double check these routinely. You haven't disclosed the two Ascendants, so the difference might be as little as just over 30 degrees (between late Libra and early Sagittarius) or it might be nearly ninety degrees (between early Libra and late Sagittarius), so it's difficult to pinpoint a likely source of error.

Tables are difficult to use precisely, unless you have an advanced calculator or a computer, in which case you might as well use proper software. Tables at best give an approximation. If you're good at approximating, you can get within say, three degrees of the 'correct' Ascendant.

I believe I have found the problem. I downloaded Morinus from the above link and got Sagittarius as my ascendant, so I decided to try figuring out what Serennu does to get my ascendant to be Libra. It sounds time-consuming and like I wasted a bunch of time, but surprisingly it didn't take much time to figure out the issue.

The issue appears to come from the use of "Greenwich" time. I am not familiar with the different time systems. This was just an experiment to see what may have been done to get my ascendant to be different. A quick look at Serennu confirmed that I was using the wrong time on it this entire time.

I never considered time formats to be the problem and the only reason I probably made the connection is because I used "Local Apparent Time" at first and my ascendant's degree was way too high.

Most calculations use my time zone, which is why most sources are saying I'm a Sagittarius ascendant (0 degrees 32'57''). If I go with my time zone, then RIYAL will probably say it's Sagittarius. It has been a long time since I used RIYAL, because for some reason I can't get it to work right on my laptop.

I believe I may have somehow assumed that Greenwich time was more accurate when I was younger even though this doesn't really make much sense. I pretty much forgot I was using it in the first place.

As for the time my hospital may have used when I was born, Daylight Savings Time is always a complicated feature. I can never remember if I should "check" it or not and what it means when it's Daylight Savings Time and when it's not. I only remember that information for myself, which isn't that useful when applied to someone else.

When we factor in Greenwich time into Morinus, my ascendant becomes late Virgo for some reason, but at least I know that my ascendant is definitely Sagittarius now.

I think that based on Greenwich Time producing different results on Serennu and Morinus that my hometown is in a weird location, but most sites will at least recognize that my hometown exists. Serennu gets my ascendant to be Libra at 10 degrees as opposed to Morinus that claims Virgo at 27 degrees when I use Greenwich time. Overall, however, I have been using Greenwich time incorrectly, which regardless will produce wrong results.

I believe my problem has been solved, but I'm surprised I overlooked this for so long.

I appreciate the help. The confusion my younger self has caused me has been cleared up.

Glad you sorted it!!

In an Astrology program you should always use your local time of birth, such as EST for Georgia or EDT during Daylight Saving dates. Local Mean Time should only be used for places that don't follow a standard time zone. Usually this will be for dates and times before the International Meridian Conference (1884) established the basis for the current system. This holds especially for times before the railway system, came into being. Before the railways, clocks were set for local mean time to give the correct time by the Sun. The railways required the introduction of timetables, and for East/West travel, each degree of longitude means a four minute difference. So even in a small country like the UK, a train journey from West to East went forward in time by up to sixteen minutes. That's some difference if you're intending to catch a train and turn up ten minutes late. The UK standardised time in 1847 on the time at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (GMT), That effectively became Universal Time following the IMC.

Daylight Saving Times were introduced during the First World War for many countries, others followed afterwards but there is no standard international system for DST.

Daylight Savings is automatically adjusted in a many of the more expensive programs, but Morinus expects you to tell it whether Daylight Saving is in force or not.

Whilst this is easy to find out for your home state, it might require more effort for other states or countries, for example Arizona and Hawaii don't have Daylight Saving changes. Europe does use Daylight Saving but it's not co-incident with the USA. In the European Union, it doesn't start till the last Sunday in March and finishes on the last Sunday in October. Using Morinus or Riyal you may need to look up the situation for other countries individually (except for those that are built in).

There's something else to look out for too. Morinus treats all time zones to the West or the Greenwich Meridan as being (-) minus hours and all time zones to the East of Greenwich being (+) plus hours. To me this makes sense. However I've come across programs that reverse the polarity so to speak and use (+) if GMT is ahead of that time zone and (-) if it is behind that time zone. So that's another source of error.

It's easy to check which the program is doing. Atlanta on EST is five hours behind GMT (usually referred to as Universal Time or UT, for these calculations) So if you are using EDT times it's four hours behind. If you cast a chart for Atlanta now, it will be 12:07, just after midday. For London the time is 16:07 (London is still on GMT till next Sunday) Using these times and casting two charts, one for Atlanta (with DST ticked) and one for London (DST not ticked) and the usual -5 hours in the relation to GMT, you should find the Sun on or very near the MC for Atlanta but somewhere in the eighth house for London.

If you cast it for Moscow which is 3 hours ahead of GMT, you will find that the Sun has set. Moving eastwards progresses the Sun from left to right in your chart. Therefore the chart for Sydney, Australia which is ten hours ahead of GMT should give you a Sun just past the IC (that is it's now early on Saturday morning there).

If your chart for Atlanta has the Sun in the sixth house rather than the tenth, then you've entered the time offset incorrectly. Taking a look through the window confirms that it is nowhere near setting.

Good luck with using Morinus for other people. I'm sure you'll find it easy to do, as long as you check those DST dates.