Fall 2025, Wichita, KS, USA

Preamble

Years ago I moved overseas, to the Netherlands, but find myself back in my home country of the United States to take care of an ill friend. I have been delving deeper into astrology since the beginning of the summer, especially 13-sign constellational sidereal astrology. Because I will have a fair amount of down time while in the US, I decide to make the jump into purchasing a professional-level program, the only one out there that currently can produce 13-sign charts.

The website for the software is dead.

The license server for the software is not working.

It is impossible to purchase or to activate.

In the coming weeks I will hear another astrologer, who relied on this software for her consulting practice, recount how she was no longer able to re-activate her copy of the software due to moving to a new computer. She was thus prevented from doing her work due to the disappearance–from one day to the next–of the license server for this software.

I write this not to focus on this one particular program, but rather to highlight the problematics of proprietary software–software that, in the end, you don’t own, you only license. Such concerns have driven the free software movement over the past 30 years and have given us the programs that literally run the Internet (as well as your Android phone, your MacOS computer, among thousands of other examples), as well as licenses that protect your rights to use software as you see fit.

As a relative newcomer to astrology I have found it rather frustrating that, with extremely few exceptions, most software is proprietary, with proprietary activation schemes, and proprietary software formats. That an entire field relies on this for their work is worrying. What happens when a company goes under? A lead developer passes on? A website ceases to function? What happens to your practice? What happens to your years of data, your years of experience using a particular program?

Professional-level astrology software can be different. It is in fact quite different at its roots, as the main code that underlies practically all astrology software, the Swiss Ephemeris, is itself released under a free software license. Why is it that so few astrology software developers provide their work under a similar license, thus allowing access when all else fails?

Thus this manifesto-of-sorts, for Selestium Astrology. I write this as a budding astrologer who nevertheless has decades of experience in creating technological artifacts: from writing software that provided the data analysis for dozens of scientific publications, to being an artist working with art, science, and technology who has had an artwork fly aboard the International Space Station, to a workshop leader who teaches people how to use ancient astronomical and astrological artifacts such as astrolabes. What my astrological interpretive skills currently lack, my understanding of the sky, astronomy, and celestial phenomena makes up for.

As a developer of computational artifacts I am also a follower of the permacomputing principles. Computing is not innocent of its impacts in the planet, both in terms of exploitation of various traditional forms of knowledge, but also, and perhaps most dramatically today, in its impact on the environment, especially through the rise of data centers used for extreme forms of useless computation, such as AI. Permacomputing is about more than just opposition to exploitation. It is, as its name suggests, drawing upon permaculture principles. As such, it recognizes that there are multiple ways of knowing in the world and thus in computing, that we have to build for resilience and failure, that we need to know how to accept limitations, that we should not build our computing worlds on proprietary foundations, and that computing can be otherwise to what we know and experience today. These are lofty goals, and Selestium Astrology may not succeed in all of them. But they are aspirational limits that we can try and approach and, I would argue, we must try and approach them if we are to survive the crises facing the planet.

With this preamble out of the way, here are the main principles that Selestium Astrology is built upon.

Open File Formats

It boggles the mind that most Astrology software–at least in the English-speaking world–is incompatible with each other. While there are basic forms of inter-software chart interchange (the limited Quick*Chart format perhaps being the most well-known), chart databases in most astrology software are completely proprietary. The file formats are locked-down. There is no public documentation. This of course results in the standard problems with proprietary formats: vendor lock-in, massive switching costs from one program to another, complete loss of data if a vendor goes under, and so on.

In Selestium Astrology the default chart format is completely open and documented. It is based on JSON, an industry-standard format for data interchange. Even if you have never worked with JSON, if you use the Internet, you have used JSON, as it underlies a huge number of services online. JSON files are, by their design, human-readable. They are simply a hierarchical set of pairs of data: a key, and a value. This allows the formats to be somewhat self-documenting.

For example, here is one part of the Selestium Astrology chart format for a particular chart:

"chartData": {
    "name": "Sylvia Rivera", 
    "uuid": "5a3d7a3aa27c4c26ba92c366264f3650", 
    "chartType": "natal", 
    "chartNotes": "Transgender activist", 
    "chartRoddenRating": "B", 
    "city": "New York City",      
    "country": "US", 
    "timezone": "America/New_York", 
    "utcOffset": "", 
    "latitude":   40.71427, 
    "longitude": -74.00597, 
    "year": 1951, 
    "month": 6, 
    "day": 2, 
    "hour": 2, 
    "min": 30, 
    "sec": 0, 
    "era": "CE", 
    ...
}

Even if you are not a programmer, I imagine that you can figure out from this format the native’s name, birthplace, timezone, latitude and longitude, and date and time of birth.

The Selestium Astrology chart format also includes all of the information necessary to re-create the chart, including full details of the zodiac being used, the objects that were selected to be calculated at the time of chart saving, their ephemeris data, their aspects, human (and software) readable “shortcuts” to their zodiac and house positions, and any other pertinent details (relocated chart? progressed chart? biwheel of transit to progressed chart?).

While indeed much of this data could be (and is, in software today) calculated very quickly, permacomputing would ask us to remember that computations that were once very expensive to do–like ephemeris calculations–might become expensive again due to changes and future limitations in computing technologies. As a result, the file format ensures that this pre-computed data is accessible into the future.

The open and documented nature of the Selestium Astrology chart format ensures that translators can be written to any current or future astrology software. I refuse to endorse vendor lock-in. If you want to move your data elsewhere, you have the right and ability to do so.

Open Cross-Platform

A common complaint among astrologers is the lack of choice for software on platforms other than Windows. MacOS users have a few choices, and Linux users are required to use emulation systems like Wine or virtual machines to run Windows software. This is obviously frustrating given that many major, professional-level software systems run cross-platform on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, such as LibreOffice (for office work), DaVinci Resolve (for film editing), or MuseScore (for sheet-music notation). Modern cross-platform user-interface libraries exist, such as Qt (which is what Selestium Astrology uses), enabling a single code-base to have an OS-native look and feel.

Selestium Astrology is thus built from the ground-up to work cross-platform. In fact, it is developed primarily on Linux, tested extensively on Windows, and confirmed to work on MacOS. While I abhor the ever-growing restrictions on what you can do on MacOS, I aim to support that platform as much as I can. But the open-source nature of Selestium Astrology (see below) ensures that others, who have more experience or desire with the MacOS platform, can help contribute to the thriving of the software there.

Open Beyond the Grave

It is inevitable that software projects will end at some point; nothing can last forever. Whether it is the illness or death of a lead programmer, the dissolution of a company, or just lack of interest from users, software needs a way to ensure its continuity for those die-hards whose livelihood may utterly depend on the software continuing to work. As a piece of open-source software Selestium Astrology will never be dependent alone on my capabilities, either in terms of time or life. It will never have activation servers that go down. It will never have a subscription model. Very few other pieces of astrological software can make those claims. In short, by making the source code open, by not relying on single-point-of-failure systems like activation servers, and by not relying on unending subscriptions, Selestium Astrology is resilient to the challenges of life and business that might otherwise affect the continuity of the software.

Open to Multiple Modes of Interaction

Contemporary astrology software seems to fall in two, diametrically opposed camps: software whose user interface looks like it hasn’t changed since the early 2000s, or software whose user interface looks like the latest flashy trends in mobile device design. Selestium Astrology sits in the middle. By using the cross-platform Qt user-interface library (mentioned above), Selestium Astrology uses current, yet classic, modes of interaction that many of us have learned over the past few decades of desktop computing. The entire software has been built to be used only with a keyboard, not only in terms of keyboard shortcuts, but also via keyboard (tab- and arrow-based) navigation.

As Selestium Astrology also uses standard user-interface elements, it can also tie into the host operating systems capabilities for alternative modes of interaction, such as screen readers. I have added, through the Qt user-interface libraries, additional information for each important user-interface element that helps those who use assistive devices such as screen readers. This is a feature that, to my knowledge, is unheard of in other astrology software. (I am not an assistive device user, and while I can test these features using screen readers like Jaws or NVDA, I am definitely open to suggestions for improvement from people who use screen readers everyday.)

Open, but Commercial

Many astrologers may not be aware, but the software that ensures that our charts are calculated with the utmost accuracy, the Swiss Ephemeris, is itself released under an open source license, the AGPL. The AGPL license requires that any software that builds upon work that is licensed under the AGPL (like Selestium Astrology using the Swiss Ephemeris) must also be licensed under the AGPL. (Things are more complicated than that, but it’s a decent summary of the terms. For the Swiss Ephemeris, they also offer a commercial license that allows you to keep your software that uses the ephemeris proprietary.) As a result, Selestium Astrology is also licensed under the AGPL. What this means in practice is that the entire source code for Selestium Astrology is available for anyone to see, comment upon, build upon, improve, or change, under the condition that any modifications are also released under the AGPL. As a result, Selestium Astrology, and its derivatives, can never be made proprietary.

Nevertheless, Selestium Astrology can also be commercial. How is this possible? While the AGPL requires that the source code be made available, it does not require that a compiled version–the version that the vast majority of people will use–be made available for free. Think of it this way: with the source code, I am giving away the blueprints to a house, but you still need to purchase the house itself (if you want it already built and livable).

As a result, the funding model for Selestium Astrology will be to sell compiled binaries of the software at competitive prices, compared to other software. These sales will fund the development of the project and will also provide access to support forums. Those who are technically minded can try and compile and run the software themselves from the source code–a not impossible project, but one that requires a lot more work than most people are willing to do, even if they are programmers themselves.

This is an unconventional, but not unique, approach to the problem of how to support the development of software whose source code is given away. It is part of my ethos as a programmer and as an artist–in fact, all of the source code for my artworks has been published online since I started over two decades ago. I believe very strongly that the source code for our digital lives should be a commons that anyone can draw from. While I hope to support a portion of my livelihood through the sale of Selestium Astrology, it is more important to me that my work, which builds upon decades of work by other programmers who also provided open access to their labor, is thus available to the people of the future.