Moira 6.9.0 - Lunar Orientation and Source-Aligned Astrology

Release date: 2026-09-26. Upgrade path: 6.8.2 to 6.9.0.

Moira 6.9.0 adds a sovereign lunar-orientation product, expands primary directions and house dynamics, and tightens eclipse and chart-pattern semantics against their governing sources. It also extends native acceleration for the new astronomical and directional workloads.

Key Changes

Lunar Orientation and Libration

• Added lunar_orientation_at() and Moira.lunar_orientation() for geocentric or WGS-84 topocentric total apparent libration, subsolar coordinates, lunar-axis and bright-limb position angles, and solar colongitude.
• Added a native DAF/PCK type-2 reader for the pinned JPL DE440 lunar principal-axis model and the admitted MOON_ME_DE440_ME421 frame transform.
• Added fail-closed resource identity, coverage, timescale, light-cone, and convention provenance.
• Validated the product with frozen JPL Horizons and NASA SVS comparisons and native-versus-SPICE matrix checks.

Eclipse Saros Identity

• saros_series now reports the conventional van den Bergh/NASA catalog series for actual solar and lunar eclipses.
• saros_index remains as a compatibility field name for that catalog series.
• The former continuous mean-month value is preserved explicitly as saros_cycle_position; saros_lunation_number exposes the corresponding NASA/GSFC Luna Num.

Jones Chart Shapes and Aspect-Pattern Coherence

• Reworked the seven Jones chart shapes from Marc Edmund Jones's primary text, including the canonical Sun-through-Pluto input set and source-specific Bucket, Locomotive, Seesaw, Splay, and Splash rules.
• Added auditable qualitative coherence bands and motion qualifiers for T-Square, Grand Trine, Grand Cross, Yod, Mystic Rectangle, and Kite patterns.
• Added typed REST contracts for pattern discovery and coherence assessment.

Primary Directions and House Dynamics

• Added bound distributions, dynamic solar-arc keys, chronological life timelines, neo-converse motion, mundane aspects and parallels, and zodiacal midpoint targets.
• Added native under-pole and Placidian mundane solvers with Python/native parity coverage.
• Added analytical house-angle and cusp-speed products, high-latitude Campanus, Regiomontanus, and Topocentric integration, and REST endpoints for house dynamics and polar admissibility.

Native Performance and Maintenance

• Added a single-pass native apparent planetary evaluator with cached SPK segment resolution and GIL-released batch evaluation.
• Added thread-local nutation caching while preserving numerical parity.
• Removed the unused export-governance subsystem and its obsolete reports and scripts.

Compatibility Highlights

• The lunar-orientation product requires the pinned moon_pa_de440_200625.bpc and moon_de440_250416.tf resources in addition to the applicable DE441/LE441 translation kernels.
• Eclipse saros_index is now int | None, not the former floating cycle phase. Consumers that need the former value must read saros_cycle_position.
• Jones classification now requires exactly the canonical ten planetary bodies; REST requests containing nodes or custom body sets are rejected with HTTP 422.

Install

pip install --upgrade moira-astro==6.9.0

For the optional REST service:

pip install --upgrade "moira-astro[server]==6.9.0"