Learn
Learn how the sky is read
Three plain guides to the questions people bring to a chart first, and the words this site's charts and sky pages use — each in plain language, each with the thing it names one click away.
Three guides
Read the sky's mechanics, plainly
Each guide carries its own computation on the page: the rising-sign form, the Sun's ingress instants for 2026 and 2027, your own Saturn-return dates. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.
Guide · with the rising-sign formWhat's my rising sign?Your rising sign is the zodiac sign that was climbing the eastern horizon the moment you were born — not your Sun sign, and not something a birthday alone can tell you.Read the guide →Guide · with the 2026–2027 datesZodiac dates: when each sign beginsEvery list of zodiac dates says roughly the same thing, and every list disagrees at the edges.Read the guide →Guide · with your own return datesSaturn return: the 29-year cycle, plainlySaturn takes about twenty-nine and a half years to complete one full orbit, which means it returns to the exact spot it held in the sky when you were born roughly every twenty-nine years.Read the guide →
Glossary
Twenty words a chart uses
Planets, signs and houses; the five aspects and their orbs; the Sun's path and its table; the Moon's month; retrograde motion and the void Moon. Each entry names its neighbours and, where one exists, the page on this site where you can see the thing itself.
Ascendant (rising sign)The sign climbing the eastern horizon at your exact birth minute and place. It sets your chart's first house and colors how you tend to come across before anyone knows you well.Read more →House (whole-sign)One of twelve life-areas of a chart, counted the whole-sign way here: from the Ascendant in a birth chart, from the Sun sign on the daily horoscope pages.Read more →CuspThe everyday word for the day a sign changes over — the boundary itself, not a blend of the two signs on either side of it.Read more →AspectAn angle between two points in a chart, measured in degrees, close enough to a round number to count as a real contact.Read more →ConjunctionTwo points sitting at, or close to, the same degree — the tightest aspect, read as a blending of whatever the two points represent.Read more →SextileA friendly 60-degree angle between two points — enough distance to be its own thing, close enough to work together without much friction.Read more →SquareA tense 90-degree angle between two points — a friction that tends to press for a decision rather than let things sit.Read more →TrineAn easy 120-degree angle between two points — the most flowing aspect, often read as an ease or a talent that arrived without effort.Read more →OppositionA 180-degree angle between two points, directly across the wheel — two things facing each other, needing balance rather than a winner.Read more →OrbHow many degrees an aspect can miss its exact angle by and still count — a margin, not a strict, all-or-nothing cutoff.Read more →EclipticThe Sun's apparent yearly path across the sky — the line the entire zodiac is measured along, in degrees, all the way around back to where it started.Read more →EphemerisA table, or an engine, giving the exact position of the Sun, Moon and planets for any date and time you ask for.Read more →IngressThe exact moment a planet crosses from one sign into the next — an entrance, not a whole day, timed to the minute.Read more →LunationA general word for a phase point in the Moon's monthly cycle — most often used for the new moon and the full moon.Read more →New moonThe point in the lunar month when the Sun and Moon meet exactly — the quiet, dark start of the roughly month-long cycle.Read more →Full moonThe moment each month the Moon sits exactly opposite the Sun — the bright peak of the lunar cycle, on the far side from the new moon.Read more →RetrogradeWhen a planet appears, from Earth, to move backward through the zodiac for a while — an optical effect of two orbits at different speeds.Read more →StationThe moment a planet's apparent motion pauses and reverses direction — the turning point at either end of a retrograde stretch.Read more →Shadow periodThe stretch before and after a retrograde when a planet revisits degrees it will cross again, or has already crossed, while retrograde.Read more →Void-of-course MoonThe stretch after the Moon's last exact aspect in a sign until it enters the next one — a pause between one thing and the next.Read more →
Method & limits
Astronomy first, reflection second.
Tropical, geocentric, from Astronomy Engine. These definitions describe what's computed; any reading is for reflection, not health, legal or money guidance. How we calculate →