⚖︎ Is Mercury retrograde? Why everything is going wrong, checked against the real sky

Something went wrong and you would quite like it to be the sky's fault. Umbriel's free Alibi takes one tap and answers honestly: whether Mercury is actually retrograde right now, whether the Moon is void of course, which planets are standing still or at a hard angle, and how often the sky offers each of those excuses anyway. No chart and no account.

• What you'll needOne tap; no chart and no account
• What you getWhat the sky is really doing at the moment you tap, each fact with its time or orb, the rarest excuse first, how often the sky offers it in a measured year, and a private tally of the days the sky had an alibi
• CostFree, no account required

Everybody has blamed Mercury retrograde for something. The trouble with the excuse is that nobody checks it: the printer jams, the message goes to the wrong person, and the retrograde gets the credit whether it is happening or not. The Alibi checks.

There is one button, "Something went wrong". Tap it and Umbriel reads the sky at that exact moment. It answers the question you came with first: Mercury is either retrograde, and turns direct on a named date, or it is direct, and the page says so kindly. Then it lists every other excuse the sky genuinely has on offer right now: an eclipse within a day and a half, a planet standing still before it turns, Venus or Mars moving backwards, a New or Full Moon, the Moon void of course with the times it went quiet and when it enters the next sign, and any two planets within 3° of a conjunction, square or opposition.

Every excuse comes with its receipt. Beside each line is the fact behind it, worked out from the sky at that instant: how fast the planet is moving, the minute the Moon made its last aspect, the orb of the angle. Nothing is written from a list of what Mercury is supposed to mean. If the sky is not doing it, the page does not say it.

And then the honest part. The sky almost always has something. Measured across 365 days of 2026, sampled every 6 hours, at least one of these excuses was available at 99.6% of the moments looked at. Mercury was retrograde at 18% of them, and the Moon was void of course at 25%. So the page ranks the day's excuses rarest first, and anything the sky offers more than a quarter of the time is still listed, still true, and named for what it is: always in stock.

When nothing rare is going on, you get that too: the sky has no excuse today, only the ones it has most days. Here is a kind one anyway: it was a Tuesday. It is a joke about the sky's willingness to take the blame, never about you and never about astrology.

Each day you tap is kept in a private tally: the days the sky had an alibi worth the name and the days it did not. There is no streak, no score and nothing to keep up. It stays on your devices and is never posted.

Nothing is looked up from a table of dates. At the moment you tap, the same VSOP87 and ELP-2000 engine that draws every chart on this site gives the position and daily speed of the Sun, the Moon and the eight planets. A planet is retrograde when its speed along the ecliptic is below zero, and standing still when its speed is under the engine's own station limit; the date it turns direct is found by stepping forward until the speed changes sign. The void-of-course window is the classical one: the Moon's last aspect to the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn before it changes sign, with both ends given in your own clock. A New or Full Moon counts when the Moon is within 12° of the Sun or of the point opposite it, which is about a day either side, and an eclipse when its middle is within 36 hours. A hard angle is a conjunction, square or opposition inside the orb stated on the page. How often the sky offers each excuse is MEASURED, not assumed: a separate tool puts 1,460 moments, one every 6 hours from 2026-01-01 to 2026-12-31, through exactly the same rules, and the page ranks the day's excuses from those shares, rarest first. A share of moments is used rather than a share of days, because the Moon is void for part of a day and a share of days would round that up. The line between an alibi and background is a quarter of all moments; the shares are measured, and that bar is the one number on the page somebody chose, which the page says in those words. Every fact printed beside an excuse is re-derived by an offline check that goes red if any of them is not true of the sky at that instant.