A Grok-3 chat (2025-03-29)

A Discussion of Time Conversion and How to Fix It

On March 29, 2025, I had a chat with xAI chatbot Grok-3 about an issue that I’ve encountered since the mid-70s regarding how to construct an astrological chart properly. I had learned initially how to do these basic time conversions: 1) standard time to local apparent sidereal time (LAST), on which the house structure is based and 2) standard time to GMT (UT1), on which the planetary structure is based. For nearly 50 years I have been doing the second conversion with a revised formula that honors the longitude of an observer, unlike the one that has been propagated by mainstream astrologers and programmers all these years that ignores or dishonors it.

After the home computer was invented in the mid-70s and astrology software was becoming available, I tried to convince many astrologers and some programmers to consider utilizing this revised formula and to incorporate into their programs. I was a beta tester for MATRIX Software in the late-70s but with no luck in achieving this goal with them. I published a journal that started in April 1983 with pleas to over 50 well-known astrologers to reconsider the time conversion issue - to no avail! It seems I had to wait until recently four years ago to get a helping hand towards realizing this dream. It was when Walter Pullen, author of the popular, freeware Astrolog program, graciously decided to construct a macro for me that with a simple click of the F3 key the chart I was looking for would be in one wheel, not two as I was accustomed to seeing for 45+ years. Thank you, Walter! One can view this adjusted chart throughout the articles on my Substack.

Grok-3 has been assisting as well for the past few months in providing Python scripts and Excel UDFs tailored to my astrological pursuits. Thank you, Grok! The chatbot has much to say about this time conversion issue, has agreed with my long-held view of astronomical time and how to convert standard time to LAST and GMT (UT1), as did the time experts who I corresponded with in the early-80s, namely P. K. Seidlemann, Dennis McCarthy and B. Guinot.

For those interested in reading the chat and, hopefully, supporting the effort to spread the good news of a better way to calculate charts, I present a PDF that you can download and share with prospective users. Let’s also hope programmers will listen and implement the long-overdue restructuring of the time conversion formula in question.

Grok-3 chat (2025-03-29).pdf