New feature: Solar Time Conversion

As many of you know, a local time recorded at a person’s birth is not precisely correct due to time zones and Daylight Saving Time, so the Hour Pillar is often incorrect. Sometimes, but rarely, the entire Chart can be wrong if the person is born during the transition between two years and the difference between local and solar time is significant.

Some tools can help you convert local time to accurate solar time, but we decided to build it in for practical reasons.

So from now on, when you open the date input page, you will see three additional fields. We will explain them in detail here so you can use them properly.

GMT ZONE

The planet Earth is divided into 24 time zones, ranging from -12 to +12. So, for example, if you are born in Berlin, your GMT zone would be +1, and that’s what you have to put in this field.

DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME (DST)

Most countries change their clocks twice a year for Daylight Saving Time. Each country has a different schedule, so you should check whether Daylight Saving Time was active at birth. On this website, you can check the historical DST changes for all major cities: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/germany/berlin.

So if your city of birth had active DST during your birth, you have to put this option to YES.

LONGITUDE

The exact position of a person’s birth is crucial for determining the Solar time. To do that, we can use Google Maps to find the coordinates for our place of birth. For example, this is a Google search for Berlin’s longitude, which is +13.40 https://www.google.com/search?q=Berlin%20longitude

The longitude can range from -180 to +180. Please ensure you don’t select the wrong value. Longitude runs west to east, and that’s the value we need, while latitude runs north to south, which is irrelevant in our case.

If you would like to find out birth information for a celebrity, you can use Astro.com; it has an extensive database that includes the exact time of birth and location, which is very useful https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Main_Page

The Solar Time feature is already live in our Chrome Extension and should appear on iOS and Android shortly, as version 5.1.