How this site calculates

The engine

Everything astronomical here comes from the Swiss Ephemeris, the library used by most serious astrological and astronomical software. It is derived from the JPL DE431 ephemeris — the same planetary model NASA uses for spacecraft navigation — and is accurate to a fraction of an arcsecond across the range this site covers.

It runs as a separate open-source service. You can read the code, run it yourself, and check any figure on this site against your own copy. That separation exists for a licensing reason — the Swiss Ephemeris is AGPL, and that licence is respected by keeping it in its own public project rather than folding it into this one.

What "computed" actually means here

Concretely, and in each case rather than in general:

Moon phases are found by solving for the moment the angle between the Moon and the Sun reaches exactly 0°, 90°, 180° or 270°. Not looked up — solved, to the second, then rounded to the minute for display.

Eclipses come from the actual geometry of Sun, Earth and Moon, and the type — total, partial, annular, hybrid, penumbral — is derived from that geometry rather than stored. A blood moon is reported only when the lunar eclipse is genuinely total, because only then does the Earth's atmosphere refract sunlight onto the whole disc.

Equinoxes and solstices are the moments the Sun's apparent ecliptic longitude crosses 0°, 90°, 180° and 270°. They are events, not days, and the times given are the instants.

The Chinese year is the hardest of these and the one most often got wrong elsewhere. Chinese New Year is the second new moon after the December solstice — or the third, when a leap month falls between, which happens roughly every three years. Skip that check and the date is a full month out. All of it is computed in China Standard Time, because a new moon late in the Greenwich evening falls on the following day in Beijing.

Horoscopes are built from real transits: where the Moon is, which aspects are exact today, what is retrograde, which ingresses fall in the period. The pages state what is in the sky and what that has traditionally been taken to mean. They do not predict, because nothing in the arithmetic supports prediction.

How it is checked

Claiming accuracy is easy. These are the checks that run before anything is published, and the build fails if any of them does:

Against an independent library. Moon phases are compared with Astronomy Engine — different author, different algorithm, different licence. They agree to within two minutes.

Against published times. The equinoxes and solstices are compared with official figures and agree to within a minute. Chinese New Year is compared with the published dates for every year from 2020 to 2034, including 2033 — the leap-month year that catches out simplified rules.

Against itself, by two routes. The Sun's ingress into Aries is computed one way as a sign boundary and another way as the March equinox. They are the same event. If the two figures ever disagreed, something in the chain would be broken — so the test compares them.

Live, after deployment. The service is queried after every release and the results checked against known values. A deployment that computes the wrong answer is rejected rather than served.

Houses, and an honest limit

Sun-sign horoscopes cannot use real houses. Real houses depend on the Ascendant, which depends on your birth time to the minute, which a page written for everyone born in a month does not have.

So these pages use whole-sign houses counted from your own sign — the oldest system in use and the only honest option without a birth time. It is stated on the pages themselves rather than buried here. Anyone offering you a detailed sun-sign horoscope with precise house placements is not being straight with you about what they know.

What is not computed

The dream dictionary is not calculation and does not pretend to be. Those entries are written from the folk and classical sources — Artemidorus, Balkan and wider Slavic tradition, and modern reporting on what these dreams actually track — and where an ordinary explanation exists, it is given. The paralysis behind chase dreams, the hypnic jerk behind falling, the full bladder behind toilet dreams: all stated plainly rather than mystified.

Numerology on the lucky number page is presented as entertainment, with the arithmetic shown so you can see exactly where the number comes from. It has no scientific basis and the page says so.

What is not collected

Nothing you type here is stored or sent anywhere. The calculators run in your browser; the horoscopes and moon dates are computed before the page is built, so reading them requires no request beyond the page itself. There are no analytics and no tracking scripts. Details are on the privacy page.

Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with a source you trust, that is worth knowing and worth telling us about — the computation is public and can be examined. Nothing on this site is too important to be corrected.