Rider–Waite–Smith card images
The initial deck uses scans identified on Wikimedia Commons as RWS1909 — Roses & Lilies. Pamela Colman Smith created the illustrations, Arthur Edward Waite directed the deck, and the Rider Company published it in 1909. The individual Commons file pages mark the scans as public domain in the United States because the work was published before January 1, 1931.
Each card page links to its specific Commons file record. The build also keeps an asset manifest with the card ID, filename, creator, year, source URL, rights status, target territory, and review date. A public-domain work can still have later recolorings, restorations, photographs, or editions with separate rights; Astrarium uses the recorded 1909 scan series rather than arbitrary images from social media or shops.
Wikimedia Commons deck category
Territorial scope
Copyright status is territorial. The first commercial audience and rights review are United States-focused. English language does not mean the imagery is automatically cleared for commercial targeting in every country. Before expanding paid marketing or native-app distribution into another jurisdiction, the image-rights manifest must be reviewed for that territory.
Astrology calculation engine
Astrarium pins Caelus 0.23, a clean-room, MIT-licensed TypeScript engine. It calculates apparent geocentric planetary positions, nodes, houses, angles, aspects, dignity information, selected sidereal modes, and astrocartography. Calculations run in the browser for the core tools, reducing server cost and keeping birth inputs off an application database by default.
Caelus source repository and validation documentation
Time-zone conversion
The core engine expects Universal Time. The companion birth package resolves an IANA time zone from coordinates offline and applies historical time-zone rules through the browser runtime. It reports ambiguous fall-back times and nonexistent spring-forward times. The interface exposes those conditions rather than silently choosing a result.
Place search
City search uses the Open-Meteo Geocoding API. Only the typed place name is sent for search. The date and time of birth are not included. Manual coordinates and device geolocation can avoid place-name search; the device location is supplied by the browser with the user’s permission.
Open-Meteo Geocoding API documentation
World map outline
The local world outline used behind astrocartography lines is rendered from the GSHHG coastline dataset distributed with Basemap. It is decorative geographic context; the planetary lines themselves are generated from the chart calculation.
Editorial interpretations
Tarot meanings, astrology reference pages, advice, and prompts are original editorial text prepared for Astrarium. Historical public-domain texts may be used for research and source comparison, but competitor copy is not reproduced. Calculated facts and interpretive claims are kept visually distinct whenever possible.
Limitations
The currently pinned calculation range is 1800–2149. Unknown birth time limits houses and angles. Placidus and Koch are not geometrically defined above polar circles and may fall back to Whole Sign. Symbolic interpretations cannot establish factual claims about health, law, money, danger, another person’s private intent, or supernatural certainty.