RE reports – Reports can only be printed out to a printer driver. For most people of course this will mean their printer. But if a person also has a PDF file maker – such as JAWS or Acrobate or some of the others available – then they can print to that driver then of course this driver will create a PDF and thus enable you to then email this PDf as an attachment to another person.

Here is a Free PDf file maker. Download this program and then use the converter as your selected printer and e-mailing natal reports works beautifully!

Probably the question I am most asked via email is: Why are parans in Starlight different to those of Solar Fire. So I am placing the answer to this question here in the FAQs.

Parans are calculated by rotating a chart through a full 24 hours, so that every planet can rise, culminate, set and reach the lower culmination. As each planet does this then Starlight checks to see if any bright star is also on one of the above angles at the same time. If so, there is a relationship between the star and the planet which we call a paran. (There is a huge philosophical background to the importance of this relationship but that is well beyond the scope of this posting)

Now there are two major questions that arise from this process.

Firstly parans are a visual system – the star culminates as a planet rises, etc. Therefore, one of the first issues to consider is since we have to move the chart through time do we find parans for the degree positions of the natal planets, or do we find parans for the actual rising (or setting, culminating, lower culmination) positions of the planets? For example, in looking at parans to a person’s moon: do we find the parans for when the natal degree of the moon rises, or do we find the paran for when the actual moon rose? – These are two different things. A person’s natal moon might be at 10 Aries but the degree of the moon as it rose (just to pick one of the angles) may be 15 Aries and later as it culminates it may be 18 Aries, etc etc.

Since fixed star paran were a visual system Starlight finds parans to the actually planets rather then their natal degrees. Indeed this is one of the reasons that Starlight was created because no other software would do parans in the way that I talked about in my book.

The next question to ask is: what is the beginning of a day? To the Egyptians and Romans it was dawn, however to the Hebrews and the Babylonians it was sunset, and to us, in modern times, it is midnight
local time.

Starlight gives the user all of those options – including the options of doing parans to natal degrees rather then the planets themselves ( the method used by Solar Fire as well as every other software prior to Starlight.)

The default setting, and one that I have worked with extensively and have found to gives best results is using the Egyptian and Roman definition of a day – Dawn to dawn and working with the actual planetary positions.

Hence when comparing a Starlight printout with a Solar Fire printout the most difference will be seen in the faster moving planets as those are the ones that will change their degree position during a 24 hours period.

Remember Solar Fire is not wrong but rather just using a methodology (like all other previous programs) which is a method that would not have been used in ancient times. – a modern method. I prefer to work with fixed star in the older methods – hence the need for Starlight.

Based on questions I receive about a lack of star planet parans in a chart I am posting this separate post on how to change the orbs for parans.

With the chart open – or paran listing etc – click the alternative mouse button and a drop down menu will appear. OR select from the main menu OPTIONS.

From this menu select PARAN STARS

This opens the Paran Calculations Options dialog box

You will notice all the different ways you can alter how Starlight does a paran, but you will also notice that the orbs are set for Paran orb = 2 minutes and angle orb = 4 minutes

Simply change these.

There are many other things you can play with in this dialog box and this was one of the main research tools we developed in Starlight to test out all the different ways of doing parans, so you may want to fiddle with other options.

Changing the zodiac for one single chart

Remember Starlight considered each window as a unique window that is to say you can have different charts open with different zodiacs, house systems etc. If you wish to change the zodiac for the chart that you are looking at then with the chart open select from the main menu or by using an alternative mouse click – Options/Chart and then on the chart option dialog box select the zodiac that you wish to use.

If you wish to change the zodiac used globally – so that all new charts will use this zodiac then you need to change the default zodiac.

Changing the Default Zodiac

With NO CHART OPEN or NO parapegma open – in other words a blank screen. Select Options/ chart. In the chart option dialog box, select the zodiac you wish to use. Then save this by clicking the “Save as” button and name your new chart option file. Then click OK. This new file will now be used for all charts.

PS – this is also how you can set the default house system, planets, aspects, nodes etc.

The parapegma is primarily designed to show the rhythm of star phases for a given latitude. You can find the parapegma under the TOOLs on the main menu.

You can turn any event in the parapegma into a chart by simply double clicking on the event. That is to say double click on a new moon then you will get the chart for the new moon for the location of the parapegma. The zodiac used for this chart will be the zodiac that you have selected as your default zodiac.

We have had some users suddenly getting error messages in Starlight after installing other software- the message is:

“file not registered” or “class not found” and will only occur after installing some astrological software – at the moment this is ONLY happening to a few Users after installing other software.

We believe this is an ACS atlas OCX problem and that that the ACS ocx has been deregistered, by the new software installed after Starlight.

If you get this problem then you can re-register the ocx manually and get Starlight working again. The instructions are as follows:

Click on Start> Run from the Windows task bar. In the dialog box that is displayed enter

regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Starlight\acsatlas.ocx”

and click on OK. A message should then be displayed saying “DLLRegisterServer in C:\Program Files\Starlight\acsatlas.ocx succeeded”.

Your Starlight should then run again.

Yes Starlight runs on Vista, indeed this is what it runs on all my machines.

Parans can be listed in two ways the default is by time period, which also gives you the Heliacal Rising and Heliacal Setting stars but you can also list the natal parans just by planet – which is handy when you want to simply check what parans are linked with what planets.

To change the way parans are listed for just one example
With a page of parans open click on the “Text 1” large button in the main menu on the main screen. From that drop down menu then select “Parans 2” you will notice the parans are now listed by planet.

To change the way parans are listed for the default settings

With no parans or chart open select “Parans 2” from the “Text 1” menu.

While you are looking at these text1 features try selecting different options to explore what other information that Starlight can list for you.

The features in the Text 2 button are the same but control the text box in the combination screens of chart or sky map PLUS text beside the map (Text 1) and text beneath the map (Text 2 options”.