Ignore the “current settings” bit, which defaults to Mars. Click on “Target Body”:

Since asteroids are called complicated things like 2P/Encke [2000], I need to enter *chris* as my search - the asterisk means “match any characters”, so this will find anything with “chris” in it when I click on the Search button:

As you can see, there are quite a few of these - I’m going to choose “1698 Christophe (1934CS)” as being the closest to my name, so I select it and click on the button:

This now takes me back to the main menu. This time, my “Current Settings” are indeed for the correct asteroid - but not the right location. I now need to set my location, determine what period I want the ephemeris for, and how I want it output.

Let’s set the location (though for an asteroid, this is pretty academic - the position in the sky will not differ significantly between Bristol and Los Angeles), by clicking on Observer Location [change]:

There are lots of ways of selecting locations - observatories, or entering coordinates manually, but I’m going to choose from a list of cities:

Selecting “Bristol England” after clicking on “Display List”, then clicking on “Use Selected Location”:

I select this, which takes me back to the main menu. Now to specify the time span. I want to know two things - where it is in my birth chart, and where it’s going to be over the next twelve months. Let’s do the twelve month ephemeris first, by clicking the “Time Span” change link:

I want to go from January 2007 to December 2007, so I set the range from 2007-01-01 to 2007-12-31 (format is yyyy-mm-dd) and select 7 day intervals (so I get a weekly ephemeris), then click on “Use Specified Times”:

I click on “Use Specified Settings” at the bottom, and this takes me back to the main menu. Now for the clever bit - to specify “Table Settings”:

The folks at NASA don’t really approve of astrology, so they don’t make it easy for us. Click the Table Settings change link, and this is what you’re presented with:

Various of these obscure looking objects are ticked. Untick all of them EXCEPT choices 3 and 31 as shown below. RA and DEC are the celestial equivalent of latitude and longitude - astronomers use them to define the co-ordinates of a planet or star. Astrologers use something similar, but which gives the longitude along the ecliptic. This is what option 31 means. Option 3 is useful, because it includes the “rate” - namely how fast the body is going. If you want to know when an asteroid goes retrograde, you need the rate. A negative rate means it’s retrograde.

Click the “Use Selected Settings” button again, and we’re back to the main menu with all details correct:

Finally, we can decide how we want the output to be displayed - HTML, plain text or downloadable, by clicking on the “Display/Output [change]” link:

The default is HTML, but I’m going to change this to plain text because it makes it easier to read. After going back to the main menu with all details correct, generate the ephemeris by pressing the “Generate Ephemeris” button, and the following appears on the screen:

keep scrolling down, and eventually you’ll come to the information:

So what does it mean? Well, the columns of interest are the dRA*cosD column - if it’s negative, it’s retrograde on that date - and the ObsEcLng column. On 7 May 2007, asteroid Christophe is at 145.0077769 degrees. Starting with Aries as 0 degrees, Taurus as 30 degrees and so on, we can see that 145 degrees is 25 degrees of Leo.

Now I’ll modify the Time Span to my date of birth (15 March 1960 from 15:25 to 15:26 - the end time must be AFTER the start time, not the same as it):

And now I get:

So in my natal chart, Christophe was at 4.739 degrees - in other words, 4 Aries 44. Oh dear! Square to my natal Jupiter!

So what does it all mean - astrologically? Who knows? I wouldn’t use this too seriously when doing a chart, but it’s fun to explore.

For further details, e-mail me at chris@bristolastrology.net or telephone me on 0117 963 6847