Asteroid Resource Guide
Your gateway to the archetypal and mythic realm of the asteroids in astrology.
“Before the use of asteroids, the only significators of the feminine in traditional chart interpretation were the Moon and Venus.”
– Demetra George
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Asteroid Goddesses
the mythology, psychology, and astrology of the re-emerging feminine
Demetra George and Douglas Bloch
featured talks on the asteroids
asteroid goddess report
This personalized astrology report is generated using your birth data and based on Demetra George’s ground-breaking best-seller Asteroid Goddesses. You’ll gain valuable insight into the role of four of the major asteroids in your chart, along with expanded delineations and concepts not found elsewhere. Read on for more information…
$25 Buy Now
For more on the asteroids, check out the asteroid category in the shop.
You can also visit Astrology University for where I have a four week course on the Asteroids.
RESOURCEs FOR Asteroid Calculations
Please note this is current as of 2021. Prices may be different depending on when you review this resource list.
Computer Software Resources for Asteroid Calculations
CCRS Asteroid Program, Kepler software, and Solar Fire software are computer programs that will calculate the positions for the many asteroids beyond those of Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, and Chiron. Below are the descriptions from CCRS, Kepler, Solar, Fire, and Janus in response to my inquires. You can contact them directly for more information and any installation or directions that you may need. The program that I use is from CCRS.
1. CCRS Asteroid Program was developed by Mark Pottenger, son of asteroid pioneer the late Zipporah Dobyns. You can only purchase it directly from him and he does not have a website. His email is markpott@pacbell.net. This is a stand-alone program that calculates only the asteroids and the new planets discovered beyond Pluto. It includes a library of over 22,000 asteroids from which you can create your own custom lists. The lists can be sorted alphabetically as well as zodiacally. About 500 asteroids will fit on two pages of print out hard copy. Mark provides regular updates to the program as new asteroids are named. You do not need any other software to run tis program. It is available for both PC and MAC.
This is from Mark:
Asteroid Ephemerides
CWAstEph is a Windows-based program to read asteroid ephemerides and print the zodiacal placements of a set of asteroids for a chart. It can work under the CCRS Horoscope Program, but the standalone version is included with the ephemeris files.
A hard disk is REQUIRED on all systems. Program instructions are only a few pages.
We have a complete set of ephemerides of named asteroids (20,512 named asteroids—all namedto date). A complete printout of all named asteroids for one chart took over 70 pages of 3 columns on a typical laser printer quite a few updates ago. I haven’t printed recently. We had 453 asteroids in our original 1980s standard set, divided into 23 thematic groups: Africa, Alcohol, Arthur, Business, East Hemisphere, Egypt, Europe, Fates, Fighters, First Names, Flight, Last Names, Misc, Misc Myth, Moons, Peace, Power, Psychics, Relate, Russia, Scholars, Thought, West Hemisphere. About 50 pages of material on name meanings for this standard set is included with the program. We no longer offer the standard set, just the complete named set.
The ephemerides cover the period 1500 – 2099 and require a little over 1 GB of disk space. Ephemerides for 20,512 named asteroids for 1500-2099: $100.00.
Later updates are $25.00 per update. New names usually come out every month or two. I can send an e-mail notification of new names to anyone who asks.
Note: I have not done any write-up of meanings for asteroid names beyond the original standard set of 453. If you are interested in more asteroids, I strongly recommend the Asteroid Name Encyclopedia by Jacob Schwartz, Ph.D. ($19.95, Llewellyn Publications [now out of print]) or the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names by Lutz D Schmadel (about $150 from Springer-Verlag). Each edition of Schmadel has gone out of print very quickly–the fifth edition is the last I have. This book gives the astronomers’ write-ups of the source of each asteroid name.
Mark Pottenger
markpott(at)pacbell.net
Cosmic Patters Software – David and Fei Cochrane http://www.astrosoftware.com
Kepler and Sirius Programs: The asteroid features in Kepler and Sirius are not in a specific module. Asteroids are incorporated into nearly every part of the program so if you are looking at a chart wheel and want to add asteroids to the wheel or you use a graphic ephemeris and want to put asteroids in it, or you are looking at AstroMaps and you want to put asteroid lines in it, or you are looking at midpoint structures and you want to put asteroids in it, or you want an interpretation of asteroids conjunct planets (this interpretation feature is in Sirius only and not Kepler), you can do it. I don’t see a nice summary of all of these features on our website but there is this video on asteroids that is helpful: https://youtu.be/3F5W1R56e7g You can skip forward every 5 minutes or so into the video to see what is described rather than watch the whole thing if you prefer. One thing that is not in the video is the “Any Asteroid” feature in Sirius 3.0. This video was made in 2014 when the current version of Sirius was 1.3. The “Any Asteroid” feature lets you select any asteroid as long as your computer has an Internet connection. There is no limit to the asteroids you can select because Sirius will get the needed asteroid data from the astro.com website in Switzerland in about 1 second and download it to your computer. The price of Kepler is $300 and the price of Sirius is $550, and the upgrade from Kepler to Sirius is $300. I recommend to many people to get Kepler because it is less expensive and then upgrade to Sirius later if you want to. However, the “Any Asteroid” feature in Sirius is very cool . . . you can just select any asteroid without any restrictions and there are a few other asteroid features that are in Sirius that are not in Kepler.
Note from Demetra: When you bring up a chart and select certain asteroids, they will show up on the outer rim of the chart and this can be printed. But if you print out a custom list, it may use up a lot of pages of paper.
SOLAR FIRE https://www.esotech.com.au/products/solar-fire/
This is from Zane Stein who can answer your questions about installing and using the asteroid options zanestein(at) gmail.com
Q: How many of the more than 20,000 asteroids now available does SF include or have access to? Is this list updated regularly?
A: Solar Fire comes with 1081 asteroids, dwarf planets, centaurs, and Transneptunian bodies. From time to time, additional bodies are added to the list. For those interested in working with a larger number of bodies, the Asteroid Add-on includes more than 10,000 additional minor planets. And if you wish to include any minor planets that are not in the above, you have the option of going to the Astro.com website, copying the Swiss Ephemeris file from there, and adding it to Solar Fire. Thus, it is possible to add any minor planet to Solar Fire, once it has been given an official Minor Planet Number by the astronomers.
Q: Can a person create custom lists from the larger library?
A: Solar Fire comes with some custom lists. But the user can make any number of additional customized lists.
Q: Can the chosen asteroids be sorted zodiacally as well as alphabetically?
A: This depends on what output you wish to use.
Solar Fire gives you the option of putting up to 50 minor planets directly into a chart wheel with “User Defined Points”, or up to 100 in one of our charts with an Extra Ring. This doesn’t give
you the option, per se, of printing out a list directly in addition to showing them in a chart. You can run a chart page with a box on it that will list all the 50 or 100 minor planets in the chart, and you can control how many columns using the page editor, so you could get all of them on one page if you’d like.
You can also run a list of asteroids of your choosing, and print the list. These can be sorted by name or by zodiacal position. You can definitely do 400; I have done as many as 634 in one list.
Q: What does the printout look like? How many pages for let’s say 400 asteroids?
A. With this type of printout, 400 asteroids would give you a lot of pages. When I ran the report for 634 asteroids, it took 18 pages, although the last page was not a full page.
Q: What version of the software is necessary?
A: To run a report like the above, SF v7 or later.
To include the minor planets in the charts, SF v8 or later.
Q: Is there an add-on module and with what versions is it compatible?
A: The only add-on module is the one mentioned above to add the thousands of additional minor planets. This requires Solar Fire 9, and will work later when we come out with Solar Fire 10.
Q: Can the tech person create a short document of how to set up this function as well as a tech support phone/text/email contact?
A: I can do this, but it wouldn’t be a real short document, unless you only want it to show how to use the 1000+ minor planets that come with SF. If you want me to also include the Asteroid Add-On, and/or adding additional asteroids from Astro.com, that would make it quite a many-paged document.
ASTRO GOLD FOR MAC
The only other program that has more than a handful of Minor Planets is Astro Gold for Mac, but it has a very limited number. Some are standard points, like Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Chiron, and Eris. There are also Sheets which list an additional 25 minor planets. But there is no way, currently, to add any others. We may additional groups of asteroids over time, but don’t know for sure.
Janus Software:
Janus 5.3 includes all the asteroids we could find glyphs for so we can put them in lists, graphs and wheels etc.
Chiron can be selected in the Planet selection table.
The positions of all these asteroids are automatically calculated and saved with every cast chart.
To get a list of asteroid positions in a chart, from the Janus 5 main screen menu, click View > Planets. You can select which asteroids to display, and what coordinate system positions to display. The asteroids can listed alphabetically and by house.
We are not planing to add any additional asteroids at this stage.
You can select which planets and asteroids to include in the list.
You can select which asteroids to calculate in the Ephemeris Generator module.
Further Resources
You can order your own list of 22,000+ asteroids for your chart (zodiacal and alphabetical) from Dave Campbell at http://theastrologystore.com/the-astrology-stores-online-store/personalized-astrological-reports
Click link above and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to select the asteroid list options. Then email Dave your birth info, date time and place to: theastrologystore(at)gmail.com