What The Ancient Skies Is, and What It Isn't

The Ancient Skies is a birth chart calculator built on a simple premise: the history behind astrology is more interesting than the horoscope column version, and that history deserves to be told properly.

The Babylonian scribes who invented the zodiac had been keeping continuous observational records for over three centuries before they wrote the first personal horoscope. The Greeks who developed the Ascendant calculation were using water clocks and geometry. Ptolemy's second-century manual was the standard reference in European universities until Copernicus. None of that gets into the popular version of astrology. It should.

How the Calculator Works

When you enter your birth date, time, and place, two things happen. First, the calculator works out the exact positions of the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and your Rising Sign at the moment and place of your birth, using the VSOP87 planetary model, developed at the Paris Observatory and accurate to within fractions of a degree. These are precise astronomical positions, not approximations.

Second, those positions are interpreted using the Hellenistic astrological tradition as codified by Ptolemy in the second century CE. The reading is generated fresh for each chart, and references the actual degrees and sign combinations calculated for your birth moment.

Your data is not stored. Each reading is generated in real time and not retained after your session.

What This Site Does Not Claim

Astrology is not empirically predictive in any scientifically validated sense. The Ancient Skies does not claim otherwise. What the history articles on this site do argue is that the framework astrology operates within has a serious intellectual history that most people are unaware of, and that this history is worth understanding regardless of what you believe about astrology's predictive validity.

The calculator is built on real astronomical data and a coherent interpretive tradition. What you do with the reading is entirely up to you.

The Technology

Planetary calculations use the VSOP87 planetary model, developed at the Paris Observatory. The site has no database; nothing about you is retained between sessions.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or feedback are welcome at privacy@theancientskies.com.