What an ingress is
An ingress is the instant a planet's ecliptic longitude reaches 0° of the next sign. Before that minute the planet is in the old sign and after it in the new one, so a birth an hour either side of an ingress can read differently.
While a planet is retrograde it can cross a boundary backwards and return to the sign it just left. Those rows are marked in the table, and the planet crosses the same boundary forward again once it turns direct.
What a station is
A station is the instant a planet's apparent motion along the zodiac stops and reverses: retrograde when it starts to slide backwards against the stars, direct when it resumes its forward motion.
Seen from Earth, a planet hardly moves for days around a station, so the exact minute matters less for where it stands than for which side of the turn a moment falls. Each row gives the degree where the planet turned.
How these instants are computed and checked
The rows come from the same almanac every sky page on this site reads, computed with Astronomy Engine 2.1.19: geocentric apparent positions in the tropical zodiac. An ingress is found to the second and shown to the minute, rounded down; a station is the minute the planet's daily motion changes sign.
Checked against the Swiss Ephemeris at ten instants in late 2026 and 2027, five ingresses agreed to within four minutes and five stations to within a quarter of an hour. A station's minute is the least certain number on this page, because the planet's motion is close to zero there.
Why other tables can differ
Published tables often print a local time zone, round to the hour or use another ephemeris, so the same ingress can appear an hour or a calendar day apart. A station also depends on how the turning point is defined, and for the slow outer planets, which barely move for weeks around a turn, two careful tables can differ by hours.
Compare the UTC instant first. The right-hand column shows the same instant on your device's clock, where the date can differ by a day.
Planning around a date? Check the UTC instant, then the column on your own clock.