Software for calculating parans

Enigma Parans 1.0 is a program for the calculation of parans.
The program calculates with high precision the times of rising, culmination, setting, and anti-culmination of both planets and fixed stars. It also selects the effective Parans based on these positions.
Enigma Parans is bilingual (Dutch and English). It is accompanied by a user manual and the program has a built-in help function. Enigma Parans is free and open source. More information.

Enigma Cycles 0.1 – beta available

Starting today you can download the application Enigma Cycles. This program allows you to calculate cycles for a large number of celestial bodies and other points. You can use longitude, latitude, right ascension, declination, and distance. You can work tropical or sidereal and geocentric or heliocentric. You can calculate cycles for a period of almost 30,000 years. The results are shown on the screen and saved in a csv-file. You can show the results in charts: both a line chart of the cycle and a bar chart of the frequencies. The program is bi-lingual (English and Dutch) and has extensive online help and a user manual. The program is free and open source. More information: Enigma Cycles.

Using R

For statistics, people often use SPSS, a statistical package that is around for quite some time.
However, the hegemony of SPSS is pretty much challenged by R, an environment and programming language that is open source, free and offers an extremely wide spectrum of statistical functionality. Currently, R is gaining momentum and certainly a worthy replacement for SPSS. R does not offer a graphical user interface but another party supplies RStudio, both in a commercial and in a free version. RStudio is available as a free open source version and the only difference with the commercial versions is the support provided.
So R and RStudio offer a good way to handle statistics. Therefore I will make it possible for Enigma to export data to an R environment and possibly even make a direct connection. If you want to use SPSS that should not be a problem as the data can be exported in a generic format that is also recognizable by SPSS. But the focus of Enigma will be on R.
You can find more information on R at https://www.r-project.org/
For RStudio have a look at https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/

Enigma release 0.2

Enigma will show a lot of astronomical data. In the screenshot, you see some data as currently calculated. This is done in release 0.2 which now is finished. The next release 0.3 will be mostly about improving the code. The result of that release will be published. For an executable program, you will need to wait until release 0.6 which will appear in a few months.

Planning for Enigma

Enigma is not yet available as initial work is still in progress.
The following releases have been defined:

  • 0.1 This first release contains a basic setup and integrates the Swiss Ephemeris. It contains a minimal user interface that shows a startup screen (dashboard) and an input screen for the calculation of a chart. The input screen performs validation for the inputted data.
  • 0.2 Calculates positions for Sun, Moon, planets, mean node and houses and shows them in tabular form. Calculations are performed for longitude, latitude, right ascension, declination, including the daily speed. Azimuth and altitude are also calculated but without speed. For celestial objects (not houses) the distance and its daily speed are calculated.
  • 0.3 A technical release. The application is refactored using insights learned from the first releases. Some checks are added, mainly for the existence of the correct ephemeris files. The only visible change is the addition of the current version number.
  • 0.4 Add a database. Enigma now handles several house systems, ayanamshas, and selections of celestial objects. The data for these selections are retrieved from the database.
  • 0.5 Enigma shows a graph of the chart and has a font with astrological glyphs available. In tabular presentations, the user can select the use of glyphs or the use of abbreviations.
  • 0.6 Personal configurations are added. The user can define multiple configurations and select one of them for calculations.

Release 0.1 is finished and I am about to finish release 0.2.
Starting with release 0.3 I will make the code of each release available for programmers at GitLab.
After finishing 0.6 I will supply a first – obviously simple – version of the application to the interested users. Expect new versions after almost every later release.

Starting with release 0.7 I will focus on cycles but also add interpretation techniques to the radix and make a small start with statistics. I intend to start with ArchaeoAstronomy in later releases.