Introducing the Advanced Astrolabe

For quite some time now I have been basing my class, and my discussions here, on an astrolabe with fairly basic options. Linked to the right you will find a zip file containing the components for this basic astrolabe, along with the handout for my class. But there is more to the astrolabe than just […]

Another astrolabe in work

This one is a metal astrolabe. A work in progress that uses some of the output of the Astrolabe Generator. Images used with permission.

An Astrolabe in Work

I got this last night via Twitter: https://twitter.com/cforchino/status/434176137216794626 Nice work, he has a steadier hand than I do. Please do email or tweet me your astrolabes, I’ll be glad to post them. Addresses are on the right.  

The Astrolabe as an Artist’s Tool

In this week’s email: “I use your astrolabe constantly for my artwork, I make extremely long exposure pinhole photographs tracing the suns path over the course of a day to half a year. www.matthewallred.com  I use your astrolabe to determine rise / set times and declination as well as the transit alt for the sun. Then plan which time […]

Major Update!

Yeah, I’m still plugging away, between burnout and other commitments I haven’t had a lot of time for this project. This has changed with the turning of the year. First up, I have made a major update to the Astrolabe Generator. I finally figured out a way to digitize a set of zodiac symbols and […]

Adding a Hemisphere

I’ve been lax on updating the blog lately. Not because I’ve not been interested, but because I’ve been busy. First off: I have received two requests to modify the Astrolabe Generator to support the southern hemisphere. This took a bit of recoding and rearranging some of the functions, but the result is now up and […]

There’s an App for That: An astrolabe for the iPad

As I mentioned a while back, there is a developer out there using the output of the Astrolabe Generator to create an astrolabe app for the iPad. Well, version 1 is complete and available for free on the App Store. The website is: http://taucetisystems.com/. I have not had a chance to look at it yet, […]

Bug Swatting and New Options

One of the Astrolabe Generator’s users, Jürgen Hoefeld, spotted a problem with the alignment of the Houses of Heaven, the intersection point should be on the horizon, and was not. I have it fixed now and the changes checked in to SourceForge. I have posted the updated generator to the site as well. In addition […]

Random Jottings

The Missing Manual has gone missing! As some of you might have noticed, the Joomla site for Astrolabe: The Missing Manual is gone. Like the original wiki it replaced, it was not meeting my needs, so I nuked it.  Do not despair! The manual still exists, and is still being added to regularly (more regularly […]

The Future: Moving the Astrolabe Generator away from Flex

I like Flex, but the tools to use it are not cheap. I can’t afford $250+ for the next version of Flash Builder and from what I’m seeing even Adobe is jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon. If Adobe offered a free, noncommercial version of Flash Builder, I might be convinced to stay with the platform. […]