u/Patient_Act_2028

Some one made a statement her marriage was arranged near Sun IC and Venus IC Intentionally in Palermo, Sicily as it was decided by an astrologer. But is IC better or DC better for a marriage event?

https://cartostar.com/s/IiGPfq9l you can check her chart here.

Although cartostar prefers 3D Globe view as default view for Accuracy and removing mercator approximations, ease of use and user's preference to switch between views is considered and we launched 2D View today.

https://cartostar.com go check it out. 🚀

Hi everyone,

I've been deep in the weeds of Lunar Node lines on ACG maps recently and noticed that depending on whether you calculate for the True Node or the Mean Node, the lines can shift geographically by a noticeable distance — sometimes landing over completely different cities. That obviously matters a lot if you're using astrocartography for relocation or travel planning.

Jim Lewis's original ACG system was built around the 10 classical planets at the four angles — the Nodes were actually added to his interpretive handbook later as an extension of the core framework, alongside Chiron. So the Node lines in ACG are a post-Lewis evolution that the broader community has developed and validated over time. That said, I know for sure they work. I recently looked at a chart where a person's ancestors came from cities sitting right on her South Node MC line — a pretty literal manifestation of the ancestral connection the South Node carries. The IC and MC angles have long been associated with roots, lineage, and heritage in astrology, and the South Node layered over the MC makes that ancestral symbolism almost cartographically literal. That was too precise to be coincidence."

Full disclosure: I'm building an Astrocartography app called CartoStar (https://cartostar.app), and precision is our north star as a philosophy. We default to the True Node because it tracks the Moon's actual motion rather than a smoothed average. Historically, the Mean Node was the standard partly because it was just easier to calculate — modern computing has made it far more practical to work with the True Node's exact position at the resolution ACG maps demand. Now that the trade-off no longer applies, defaulting to True Node felt like the right call.

That said, I'm genuinely curious how practitioners here handle this:

1. Which node do you default to on your maps, and why?
2. Have you tested both — e.g., visited or lived near your True Node line vs. Mean Node line — and noticed a clear difference?
3. Do major tools (Astro.com, Solar Fire, etc.) default to one or the other?
4. For those trained in the original Jim Lewis methodology — is there a strict preference, or is it left to the practitioner?

"For reference — the True Node and Mean Node are usually within about 1–1.5° of each other, and can stretch up to ~2.5° apart in some cases. On an ACG map that translates to roughly 80–170 km of lateral shift at mid-latitudes (like NYC or Madrid), and up to ~280 km near the equator. That's easily enough to put the line over a completely different city — which is exactly why precision matters here.

Would love to hear your thoughts, especially from anyone who's compared both in lived experience!

CartoStar now has iPhone Widgets and Apple Watch App for Local Space Compass. 🧭

https://cartostar.app