Observe

This software is used to perform statistical tests on astrology. It is at a draft stage.
It computes and represents distributions and generates statistical indicators.
To have an idea, you can look at the output of the program, in particular the summary pages of the studies: See page "Questions" for an overview of the current situation.

Note: here, "planet" is used in its etymological sense, "wandering body", so the sun and the moon are also called planets.
What are we doing ?

Data

We are processing dates, for example the data sent by Didier Castille: Screenshot of a00.csv, sent by Didier Castille
It contains 591 936 lines with 3 or 4 dates:
  • Mother birth day
  • Father birth day
  • Child birth day
  • Wedding date
(321 838 lines contain wedding dates)
Mother Father Child Wedding schema

Planets

For each date, we compute planetary positions. These are the ecliptic longitudes of the planets at a given date, expressed in degrees, between 0 and 360.
Astrological chart of Grothendieck 
+-----+------------+
| day | 1928-03-28 |
+-----+------------+
| SO  | 7.577      |
| MO  | 97.618     |
| ME  | 340.585    |
| VE  | 342.739    |
| MA  | 322.279    |
| JU  | 14.344     |
| SA  | 259.157    |
| UR  | 3.626      |
| NE  | 146.828    |
| PL  | 103.775    |
| NN  | 73.017     |
+-----+------------+

Here are the main planets:
Planet Sun Moon Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto
IAA code SO MO ME VE MA JU SA UR NE PL
Symbol ☼ ☾ ☿ ♀ ♂ ♃ ♄ ♅ ♆ ♇
(IAA = International Astrological Association)

Distributions

Then we compute distributions:
Distribution where each planet is represented individually
1
Distribution example: planets in Gauquelin sectors
2

We take each planet separately and represent their positions in a single drawing (example 1).
Then we group the positions by bins (36 bins of 10° in example 2).
This grouping is called a distribution.
This gives one distribution per planet.
Gauquelin 1955, example with 12 bins

The program handles two types of distributions: Single date distributions and Several dates distributions.

Expected distributions

The distributions computed to represent the original data are called the observed distributions.
To see if these distributions show anomalies, we need to compare them to the expected distributions, the distributions that we should observe "in theory".
This program uses two different ways.

Control groups

Control groups are fictional groups obtained by randomly shuffling the data. Observed distributions, control groups, expected distributions Several control groups are built, and the mean (average) distributions are computed.
This is supposed to produce what we should observe in theory.

Average values

This method can be used for tabular data without computing control groups, detailed in page Expected distributions

Statistical tests

Once the expected distributions are computed, it is possible to use statistical tests to see if the comparison between observed and expected distributions show anomalies.
The first test is the chi-square test, which indicates if the difference between observed and expected distributions is significant.
If a difference is significant, the effect size is computed to know how much the anomaly affects the individuals of the group.
Next: Single date distributions

About

Observe is a CLI (Command Line Interface), a tool used in a terminal (console) which pemits to issue commands to work on the data.
For example: 
php run-observe.php death-fr control 1-100
Means: "for study death-fr, compute control groups, from 1 to 100".
See page Usage

Program started in december 2020 by Thierry Graff to compute Births in France in 2000 distributions for Nick Kollerstrom.
Rewritten in 2026 to study Deaths in France since 1970.

Program developed and tested under Linux (Debian 13) with php 8.5. A priori, it should also work under Windows and Macintosh.