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Author's Note: Blue*Star is now officially out of date. It cannot work with inkjet printers, and configuring it to work with Windows 9x is a chore beyond the capacity of most astrologers. I am only including this review on my website because for many, many years, Blue*Star was the best astrology calculation program in the world. I was recently asked by an astrologer wanting to study fertility cycles whether there was any astrology program that allowed you to define your own aspects. There is one. It also happens to be my favorite and most used piece of astrology software, even though I have virtually every program on the market. It is also the only program that can: Search chart files for many astrological factors, including planets at specific degrees, and predominances & absences, or search for personal information like telephone number, address, or balance due, and then collect all the charts fulfilling your search criteria into a set that you can then perform astrological jobs on. For example, you could collect all of your clients born in May, and in "one fell swoop" print out Solar Return charts for all of them. Whenever I forget a client's last name, I just search for all of the Cheryls, for instance, and review the list. You can also create invoices and generate mailing lists with this feature. Create a collated chronological hit list of predictive events for different time ranges, aspects, and planets. For example, for every client I see, I want a listing of progressed stations, lunations, and house ingresses from birth to the end of the century, plus -- for six years starting two years ago -- progressed-to-natal aspects, Solar Arc to natal conjunctions, outer planet transit ingresses by house, transiting nodal conjunctions, and more, each event collated with entering-exact-leaving dates on one line, all in one list. I can do this, for each client, with just a few keystrokes. It also can optionally list bridge aspects, the aspects within orb at the starting date of any predictive search. Automate your astrological work. Imagine that you want the same set of jobs done -- say a progressed chart, a Solar return, 12 Lunar returns, and a biwheel of transiting positions around a natal chart -- for each person you see. Using most programs, this could take quite a while to set up every time you see a new client. With this software, it takes three minutes or less, once you learn how to do it. Design sophisticated chart wheels, dials, grids, and tables pages. While there are other programs that allow you to arrange charts on a page, or change the size of the wheel, no other software comes close to the power of this feature. It allowed me to design a new three wheel page showing Modern, Greek, and Vedic charts, adding small rulership tables for two of the wheels, calculating a specific Arabian part for the Greek wheel, and printing a different set of planets in each of the wheels. This module takes some skill in computer programming to use, but gives you the power to design pages with almost any kinds of charts, grids, and tables you can think of. Search for recurring natal angles and aspects. The aforementioned astrologer wanted to find future reoccurrences of the natal Sun-Moon angle, which can be done effortlessly with this program. One can also find transits and progressions to user-defined points or a set of fixed points (like the Galactic Center), occultations, and true body transits and progressions, where the aspects are calculated from the actual angles between the points, instead of as measured from Ecliptic positions. There is no program that makes it easier to find single planet-to-planet transits or progressions, e.g. Mars conjunctions to natal Saturn. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, you can also define any aspect at all. For example, you could define a new aspect of 25 degrees with its own name and orb, and use it in all of your calculations. One of the simplest, yet most useful features of the program is its Replicate key. After entering a person's birth data and the jobs you want, you can return to the data entry screen, press a key, and have the birth data re-entered. You can then change the place (for relocation work), the time or date (for rectification), or the house system, Zodiac, or Coordinate system. Another even simpler great feature is the ability to set new defaults at the push of a button. Say you want to do a dozen charts with the Equal House system and then a dozen charts with the Koch system. You'd only have to change the default house system setting once, and can switch back instantly when you're done. The program? Blue*Star from Matrix Software. Blue*Star is presently priced at $200 and comes complete with the small Matrix Time Change Atlas (for automatic entry of longitude, latitude, time zone, and time changes for several thousand places around the World), their wheel-editing program Edit Wheel and easier-to-use page-arranging program Make Wheels, over 100 superbly designed high resolution chart wheel, dial, table, and grid pages, and Quick Exchange, which allows you to convert the chart files from other companies' programs to Blue*Star and QuickChart formats. Blue*Star also comes with the QuickCharts screen program, a very fast program designed for viewing charts onscreen (with precision that's fine for the charts in the 20th century). QuickCharts enables you to view Blue*Star's output onscreen, and to print wheels in color. QuickCharts can both display and print out beautiful color single wheels, two wheels at once, biwheels, grids, tables, and graphs, for birth charts, predictive events, and synastry charts. Whenever I need to do really fast screen work, such as rectification, or look quickly at one or two charts, I use QuickCharts. Blue*Star's printouts deserve special mention. The variety of wheels and tables is outstanding, with pages that show Arabian parts around a chart; horary pages displaying the aspects formed the day before, the day of, and the day after the chart; biwheels with the aspects between the two charts drawn in; a local space map wheel with an azimuth and altitude table (for relocation work); plus a great assortment of dials, grids, triwheels, two and three wheels per page, and more. No other astrology program (except Blue*Star's successor Win*Star which has the same wheels, plus wheels in color), comes anywhere near to this range and quality of output. Almost every technique astrologers employ can be done by Blue*Star, including tertiary progressions, Local Space charts, user-defined Ayanamshas, parans, Arabian parts, Uranian planets, natal and transiting parallels, void-of-course Moon, stations, relationship charts, distance values, the Parallax Moon (the Moon's position as measured from the surface, instead of the center, of the Earth), Heliocentric positions, harmonic charts, midpoint analyses, dials, rising and culminating times, an AstroClock for the present place and time, Solar arcs, demi-returns, and much more. Its built-in 3000 year ephemeris has excellent accuracy, and you can even print out ephemeris pages. Blue*Star is no longer under development, and is not as easy to learn to use as Windows astrology programs. Nevertheless, it is the most powerful, efficient, and well-designed chart service program on the market. It runs very well on older, less powerful computer systems. And while its more powerful features take time to master, and occasionally the program crashes, its incredible speed and range of features make Blue*Star worth using for many, many years. I departed from reviewing new programs in this issue because I felt it was important to remind astrologers of what I consider to be one of the greatest pieces of astrology software ever created. Yes, I am skilled at using a computer, and have mastered the ins and outs of the program. But if you devote the time to learning to use Blue*Star's features, you will find it a very rewarding experience. You can support SoftStar News by: Telling others about our website. Sending us your insights and feedback on astrology software, Alerting us to new programs and astrological resources, Linking your website to ours, and by purchasing your astrological software through this site. Discounts on Software When you purchase astrology software through me, you will get: 1. My free expert guidance in choosing the right program. 2. The best pricing distributors are allowed to offer. 3. Free U.S. shipping, unless prohibited by the manufacturer, and for some programs, free Priority shipping. 4. Additional benefits. E.g. I offer a very inexpensive excellent transit report for purchasers of Kepler & Sirius, over 60 free beautiful extra artistic wheels for Solar Fire Gold, etc. 5. You are supporting my website, allowing me to continue posting astrology tutorials, software reviews, and much more. 6. Your software is fully registered to you and shipped to you directly from the manufacturer, with their full customer support as well as mine. To go to my secure astrology software order form, click here. Click to Return to 
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