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The people from my made-up world are strong believers in astrology. Their culture and religion revolves around the relative positions of the planets of their solar system.

Are there any resources (namely some kind of software) that may allow me to know the trajectories of made-up planets on the night sky of an earth-like planet, at any given time and latitude?

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You don't really need any tools

Astrology is (contrary to astronomy) much more a cultural aspect than a scientific one. You could spend a lot of time in finding out how the trajectories work, but the important part of astrology is more along the lines of what the interpretations of the stars would be.

To say "planet A is reaching the house of starsign B, so that must mean a war is coming" you don't really need to know how long these planets should take to travel the skies. You only need to know which planets there are, which starsigns there are, and what the interpretations would be. you would need to know the order of your starsigns.

It's true that modern western astrology gives a meaning to latitudes, altitudes and all sorts of other 'tudes, but this is a rare concept. Some cultures look at the brightness of certain stars, others don't even look at stars that are always there but only keep an eye out for shooting stars. you can make your Astrology however you want, man. Don't force yourself to make it look like what we already know of.

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  • $\begingroup$ Hum... I wasn't really going for star signs... I was thinking of making an astrology based on the alignments of the planets, relative to each other. For example, an alignment between "Mars" and "Jupiter" would mean a warrior king was about to be born. I was also trying to introduce a debate between astronomy and astrology in said culture. So, I would like the "astronomer-fraction" to say to the "astrology-fraction": planet A isn't aligned with planet B because of the will of the gods, but because the trajectories are so and so... $\endgroup$ Commented May 29, 2016 at 15:05
  • $\begingroup$ While this does provide some insight on the question, it provides no real answer to it. I can't help but feel that if you choose to write an answer, it should actually provide an answer to the question, not commentary on how unimportant the question is. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 21, 2016 at 2:32
  • $\begingroup$ OP stated their goal and asked for very complicated tools, expensive and (as seen in the reply below) unavailable. Normally I would agree with you, but sometimes I think we have to point out the easy solutions. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 21, 2016 at 22:14
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I wasn't able to find any free software that does exactly what you want, but this tool might be a decent place to start. It will only show you actual bodies in our solar system, but you might be able to extrapolate about your system from there.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you for your response! Using our own solar system would be my second choice... but I noticed that you mentioned "free" software. Does it mean there is any kind of paid software closer to what I was searching? $\endgroup$ Commented May 29, 2016 at 15:09
  • $\begingroup$ I'm afraid my wording was misleading; I should've said "publicly available". I've definitely read papers/seen visualizations involving simulations of positions of celestial bodies, but those simulators typically aren't available online. If you have moderate computer science skill, you could probably write your own decent simulator with Newton's Gravitation and Euler's method or RK4. $\endgroup$ Commented May 29, 2016 at 17:36

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