When a planet is too close to the Sun to be seen it is said to be combust — asta, 'set' — and classical texts treat it as burnt up and unable to deliver its results. This endpoint returns every combustion period touching a given calendar year for one planet.
The test is a plain angular one. The planet is combust while its geocentric elongation from the Sun is under a per-planet orb: 17° for Mars, 14° for Mercury direct and 12° retrograde, 10° for Venus direct and 8° retrograde, 11° for Jupiter and 15° for Saturn. The year is scanned with a margin at each end, because a period can straddle the New Year, and each crossing is then refined by bisection.
Send `planet` (mars, mercury, venus, jupiter or saturn) and `year`. The response is `{planet, year, periods, total_asta_days_in_year}`, where each period gives `start`, `end`, `duration_days` for the whole period and `days_in_year` for the part of it falling inside the year you asked about. Elongation does not depend on where you stand, so the timings are location-independent; `timezone_as_float` only decides how they are rendered.
Request fields
Field
Type
Required
Notes
planet
string
required
marsmercuryvenusjupitersaturn
year
integer
required
Year of birth as a number, e.g. 1990. Four digits.
min 1800 · max 2400
latitude
number (double)
optional
Latitude of the place, in decimal degrees. Positive is north, negative is south. Example: 26.9124 for Jaipur, 40.7128 for New York. Minutes and seconds are not accepted - convert first.
longitude
number (double)
optional
Longitude of the place, in decimal degrees. Positive is east, negative is west. Example: 75.7873 for Jaipur, -74.0060 for New York. Note the sign: a missing minus puts New York in China.
timezone_as_float
number (double)
optional
UTC offset of the place, in hours, as a decimal. Example: 5.5 for India (UTC+05:30), -5 for New York in winter, 5.75 for Nepal. This is NOT validated against date_time - if the two disagree you get a successful response for the wrong moment, so derive both from the same source. Use the offset in force on that date, not today's: a summer birth in a country with daylight saving needs the summer offset.