The Planets tab of the Moon and Sun Options dialog contains the settings used to specify how to display the names and symbols of planetary events for the currently selected DiaryGridLine.

Use Planetary Options

Planetary tokens or macro functions are rarely used. Therefore, to save space on disk and speed up the loading and saving of scripts, this option is set to false by default. Turn it on if your script will need to use planetary tokens or macro functions.

Font and Size

Most of the settings on this page are the text and/or symbols to use for various planetary bodies and events, but these are often the result of converting a single token (often a Macro Token) and therefore may be based on a font and font size that is not appropriate to display the corresponding planetary symbols.

Names and Symbols of Events

The Names and Symbols of Events settings are used to specify the text and symbolic elements associated with various planetary events such as rising, setting, transits, perihelion, aphelion, conjunction, opposition, ... Note that the calculations for all these events are also available for the Moon and the Sun, when applicable.

The manner in which you can display various planetary events in a script depends on the frequency of the events.

•Daily events (rising, setting and transit) are displayed using planetary tokens, as they are the most likely events to be placed at the same positions of every day in GridTemplates.

•Non-daily events (perihelion, aphelion, conjunction, opposition, ...) are usually displayed in a complex format which includes each event in a specific order with specific textual formatting. For this reason the occurrence of these events and their display is done through the use of planetary macro functions.

Names and Symbols of Planets

The Names and Symbols of Planets settings are used to specify the text and symbolic elements to use for each of the planets' name, including the Sun, the Moon and the Earth.

Except for the Earth, you can define 3 symbols per planet:

•Normal for reference to the planet in general (possibly in combination with one of the above events, such as Jupiter and Mars in opposition).

•One for each of the 2 cases when you wish to show that the planet is above or below the horizon.

The Earth cannot be beneath or above its own horizon, and therefore has only the Normal symbol.

Formatting of Times

If you are displaying the times of any of the planetary events, the formatting of the times displayed will use the specific formatting used for planetary and astronomical tokens. If your script repeats the same formatting many times, or some of the formatting strings are very long, then you can use format names and then specify the list of formats that correspond to those names in the button edit control shown on the right.

Topic 176625, last updated on 26-Feb-2023