While developing OMNICYCLES, we soon felt that it was necessary to have some means of testing the aspect files we were creating. Having files which permit the use of many transits, as well as a great of variety of aspects, is great, but the question always remains: will it "work"; that is, will the graph which it generates reflect the reality of the person's life during the time period selected? The best way to test a file, we thought, would be to use it to produce the point values for many important events in a person's past. Now, one way to do this would be to simply generate a graph for the weeks, months or years of each of the events, yet that procedure, we soon saw, proved very time-consuming. Therefore, we developed a special module which allowed us to study the specific dates of a number of important events in the lives of one, or of several people, in a few steps. This enabled us to calculate the point values for all of the event-dates at once, compare the points to the mean, convert them into percentages, put them into a list containing the aspects in effect on each important date, and then show the average value of the "averages" of all the dates.  This final number gives an indication of whether the values produced by a specific aspect file are ABOVE or BELOW the mean, and is thus an indication of whether or not the file does indeed give results which are, perhaps, significant. How is this done? Well, it really isn't as complicated as it might sound, as long as you follow the instructions step by step. Please read on...

    When installed, OMNICYCLES produces a folder named "invest" (short for "investigation"). In order to investigate the efficiency of a particular aspect file, you place two different files into this folder:

 1) The aspect file you want to test. This can be any of the aspect files (those with an .aps extension) delivered with the program, or one which you yourself have modified or created.

2) A special event file which you create (with the extension .DAT), containing a list of events in the lives of one or more individuals. These files can be tested more efficiently if all of the listed events are of the same type, for example, if all are "good", or all "bad". For example, you might want to create a file containing a list of dates of accidents, or of separations, or on a more pleasant note, dates on which the individuals in the file fell in love. In the following section, we explain how an .APS file can be tested.

    Let's suppose you want to see whether the transits of Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are really as bad as they´re often said to be. First you choose a file containing these transits (or create it, should OMNICYCLES not have it already; in this case, we have prepared such an .aps, named PL-NE-UR-SA-MA.aps, and placed it in the "invest" folder, ready to use. It is meant to serve as an example; if you wish to test another .aps file, you have merely to move it into the "invest" folder). This file contains the transits of the aforementioned planets, and uses the following aspects: conjunction, opposition, trine, square, sextile, semisquare, sesquisquare, semisextile (inconjunct), the novile series, quincunx, Harmonic 16, and also parallels and anti-parallels of declination. The natal factors selected include the Ascendent and Midheaven, yet not the Descendent or Lower Heaven (for the reason that, for example, a semisquare to the Ascendent is automatically a sesquisquare to the Descendent, you would not want to include the latter-mentioned factors, or the points for such an aspect would be doubled!). Assuming you wish to use this file as-is, you needn't re-calculate the "mean", since this file, as all others delivered with OMNICYCLES, already has the mean calculated. Thus, after deciding on this file, all you must do is insert its name into the research (.DAT) file, which you will have to prepare yourself, since it contains the event dates for the people you know. Here´s a sample research file, so that you can see how they are structured:    

SAMPLE RESEARCH FILE:

EXPLANATIONS:

   For the purposes of our sample, I have created a group of events for a fictitious family. Though the events listed are not all of the same nature, they do have one thing in common: they are all quite unpleasant. Thus, what we will be checking in our sample investigation is basically: "Is there a correlation between the combined transits of Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto and very unpleasant events in people´s lives?" Obviously, it would be more "scientific" to study events of a single nature in such a study, for instance, dates of the deaths of loved ones. However, a single individual will not experience a large number of that type of event. OMNICYCLES, for that reason, and as you can see in the sample file, permits you to use separate lists for different individuals in the same file. Thus, one might do a study with a file containing a specific type of event in the lives of many individuals. In our sample, which must here necessarily be short, we have used only three different persons. In any case, let´s continue by explaining how the information must be prepared for these files.

   This example says that the event took place on Feb 13, 1966 (1966,2,13,), at 1 am (1,00,), in New York, NY (New York,NY, - note that there should be no space after the commas!). The time format is the 24-hour system; thus, 1 am is 1,00, while 1 PM would be 13,00,. Following the abbreviation for the state (or the name of the country, as our sample list shows, as in "Madrid,Spain,") comes the name of the aspect file to be tested. This must be present in each line, but don´t despair! You don´t have to type it in by hand each time you want to use a new aspect file. Once you have one file prepared, you may use the "replace" option of a program such as "Wordpad" or "Microsoft "Word" to automatically substitute the old aspect file name with the new one for all the lines at once. Do be careful, however: if the name of the aspect file is entered incorrectly, or if it is incomplete, or if, after saving the .DAT file, the program cannot find the relevant .asp file in the "invest" folder, OMNICYCLES will not be able to calculate correctly, and you will get an error message.

   After the comma following the name of the aspect file to be used, you can type in a description of the event which took place. No commas may be included in the description, and it´s probably best to keep it short.

   Note that a couple of lines begin with an asterisk: This merely indicates that for this study, these events should NOT be used. It´s a simple, but very convenient feature, for it allows you to make one very large file containing many events of different sorts, and then make copies of it: each time you want to study a particular kind of event, you only have to enter a .dat file, disactivate (with an asterisk) the events you do NOT want to use, save the new file with a new name, and use it.

   At the end of the block containing events, you see the code #F  This merely tells the program that the list of events for this individual is complete. This code must always be present at the end of each person´s list. Should you decide to include the events for several people, you would now add the second person's info, exactly as you did for the first person.There's no limit to the number of people that can be in a file, nor is the number of events limited. (Should any user find that he/she has had problems with larger lists, let us know, and we´ll make the necessary corrections ASAP!).

   After all the info has been placed into the .DAT file, save it, remembering the name you've given it, and also its location on your hard drive. Also, make sure that the .aps file you wish to test is present in the "invest" folder. If it´s not, then your final list may contain merely a bunch of zeroes instead of meaningful data! Therefore, it is imperative that the name of the .APS file listed in your data file is written EXACTLY like the name of the .aps file which you want to test, AND that this .aps file is present in the Omnicycles/invest folder.  Now, open OMNICYCLES, select File/research from the main menu, and the program will prompt you to choose the .dat file you wish to use. You select the .dat file you created, and OMNICYCLES will begin to calculate. If, along the way, it discovers a city which is not present in the data base, you will be prompted to enter its coordinates. When finished, the list of calculations for each event date will appear on the screen, containing the calculated aspects for each of the dates, the number of total points for each event, and the percentage (in relation to the mean) for each event. (A note aside: the file created with this info will ALWAYS have the extension ".inv". The name of the file will be a series of number which represent the month/day/time the file was created. Thus, if the .inv file has the name 04080225.inv, it was created on April 8, at 2:25. We decided to use such an automatic file-naming system so that each file you generate using the research module will have a unique name, though we are well aware that you will almost always, after seeing the final results in the file, want to either erase it, or, in case you wish to save it, give it a name which you will more easily recognize in the future) The following is only a part of the list, showing the way the information is presented for the first two dates in the .DAT file:

By way of explanation of the data in this list, we´ll use the first line from the first list:
13-02-1966 1.00 [ 5.0] , Mars, 90.871, 6, 4, 4,2,5,3,3, Square>,90,2,1, 0,4,b, Mercury,250.13,341.00,+0,-90.30201,.5643876

Let's look at this line part by part...
13-02-1966 01.00 [ 5.0] ,      The date, time, time zone of the event

.... Mars, 90.871, 6, 4,      Transiting planet, numerical identifying numbers for Mars (6) and Mercury (4). These latter two numbers are included in the list, though they won´t be needed at all by the average user.

....4,2,5,3,3,  These are the values in the aspect file which can be found for the transits of Mars to Mercury.

.....Square>,90,2,1, 0,4,b,   The name of the aspect, along with the values for this aspect, as found in the last section of the .APS file. (Note: I inadvertently calculated the list above using a Spanish version of Omnicycles: the aspect names in the English version are, of course, in English!)

....Mercury,250.13,341.00,  The natal planet receiving the aspect, its exact position expressed in absolute longitude (250.13 corresponds to 10°Capricorn, 22 minutes), and the exact position of the transiting planet (Mars, in this case, at 11°Piscis).

......+0,-90.30201,.5643876   These values, at the end of the line, mean: the number of positive points generated by this aspect (+0); the number of negative points (-90.3), and finally, the strength of the aspect, expressed in a decimal less than 1, and representing a percentage: in this case, the aspect has a strength of 56.43%, since it is not exact. (An exact aspect - that is, one which has an orb of 0, would be at 100% strength, expresses in this list as "1").

Okay, okay, I can hear you now: "Man, why does this have to be so complex?!"  Well, the answer is simply that when we prepared the research module, we had at first intended it for our own use, to test the results obtained by using different aspect files. Later, we decided to share this part with our users. Thus, the result files (all ending in .inv, you´ll recall) contain many values which the average user will never need. But don´t despair! All you REALLY need to know when you test an .aps file with the research module are the FINAL results; as a matter of fact, you will usually ONLY be interested in the final three lines of the file: "Average number of points", "Total points", and "average percentage". And for most users, the ONLY one of these which is important is the last one, "Average percentage", since these are the values which will tell you whether or not the aspect file you have chosen to test gives results which are (or are not) better than average ("average" being 100%). Read on....

At the end of this long list, you can find a summary, containing only the final results (i.e., without the individual aspects found) for the dates:

  As can be seen in the final (here highlighted) figure, the average number of negative points for this group of events, expressed in percentage in relation to a 60-year mean (the 60-year mean vaules, both positive as well as negative, have been pre-calculated for all the .aps files delivered with OMNICYCLES, and are stored in the respective .aps file, in the lines "mediap=   " - for the positive mean - and "median=   " for the negative mean), is  108.99%. If this result had been obtained using a large number of events (several hundred, for example),one might conclude that this specific group of planets, with the aspects used in the .APS file, gives results which could perhaps be significant; one would expect, after all, that the negative mean would be higher in this study, since all of the events in the .DAT file were of an unpleasant nature! (Note that the positive mean was +98.90%, that is, just about average). Naturally, true research of this sort requires much more data than that given in our sample; for this reason, it would certainly be misleading to conclude that this test run was really a success. This final list can be cut and pasted in a program such as Microsoft's Excel (or any other data-spreadsheet program) for a more detailed analysis of the results.

So you see, though the list might seem extremely complex, you´ll really only need to look at its final line to see whether or not the file you´re testing is really promising or not. Though we could have made the program give you only this final result, we thought that some users might want to be able to see the list in its entirety.

By employing different aspect files, you can test your hypotheses as regards the effects of transits using any combination of planets and aspects you wish. 

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