Stars

For: everyone. Code and the key tables are at the end of the page

Stars on a palace are stored in three groups, and four further groups of "twelve gods" hang off each palace as single values.

Major stars

The fourteen major stars are the skeleton of a reading. They are placed by the rules of two series, Ziwei's and Tianfu's. Some palaces end up with two of them, some with none at all — the latter is an empty palace.

The empty-palace predicate is asking whether exactly this group is empty.

Minor stars

Fourteen minor stars, in four classes by character:

Adjective stars

Dozens of auxiliary stars, grouped by origin into year-stem, year-branch, month, day and hour families, each placed by a different rule. They split into three types:

The 32 remaining adjective stars of the default school, grouped by character:

Stars come in eight types

The three groups above together cover every type exactly once:

For a question like "does this palace see a malefic?", filtering by type is the sturdy way — star names change with the chart language, types do not.

Brightness

Brightness describes how strong a star is in the branch position it landed on, on a seven-step scale:

The same star has different brightness in different palaces, fixed by a star-against-branch lookup table. Adjective stars usually have no brightness at all.

The four groups of twelve gods

Besides the three star groups, every palace carries four single-valued fields, each coming from its own cycle of twelve gods. Each group's twelve members fill the twelve palaces, exactly one per palace.

The Python enums and Go constants for these four are listed on the enum listings.

The twelve Changsheng gods

Placed from the Five Elements class together with gender and year-branch polarity. They describe the twelve stages of a thing coming into being, declining and starting over.

The twelve Boshi gods

Placed from Lucun's position together with gender and year-branch polarity. Weighted towards talent, wealth and disputes.

The twelve Sui-qian gods

Sui-qian (岁前, "ahead of the year") is placed from the year branch, always running forward. Weighted towards the auspicious and inauspicious events of a single year.

The twelve Jiang-qian gods

Jiang-qian (将前, "ahead of the general") is placed from the year branch's trine group, always running forward. Weighted towards movement, travel and obstruction by other people.

In code

Walking the stars of one palace

chart = Astro().by_solar("2000-8-16", 2, "female", language="en-US")
soul = chart.palace("soulPalace")

for s in soul.major_stars + soul.minor_stars + soul.adjective_stars:
    print(s.key, s.name, s.type, s.brightness, s.mutagen)

ziweiMaj emperor major [+3] None
wenquMin artist soft [-3] None
fengge refined adjective None None
tianfu lucky adjective None None
jielu intercepted adjective None None
feilian instigated adjective None None
nianjie considery(Y) helper None None

Fields on a single star:

The four groups of twelve gods

for p in chart.palaces:
    print(p.name, p.changsheng12, p.boshi12, p.suiqian12, p.jiangqian12)

Each field also has a *_key variant (changsheng12_key and so on); predicate on that.

Finding where a star is

if let Some(star) = astrolabe.star(StarKey::ZiweiMaj) {
    // StarRef derefs to Star, and can also give the palace it sits in
    println!("{:?} {:?}", star.brightness, star.palace().name);
}

The lookup walks all three groups, so major, minor and adjective stars are all findable; a miss returns an empty value.

Star-name table

The same star reads differently in each chart language while the key stays put. The English vocabulary comes from iztro's own word list: it is interpretive rather than transliterated, and it is not the rendering conventional in English-language Zi Wei writing. It is for display only — always predicate on the key.

Keys for the adjective stars and the twelve gods are in the sections above. To convert between any key and any language, use the translation and reverse-lookup functions — see Multilingual output.