℞ Free Retrograde Calendar — What's Retrograde Now, and When It Turns

Umbriel's free retrograde calendar shows which planets are apparently moving backward right now and the date each one turns around. A review window, not a curse. Free, no account.

• What you'll needNothing
• What you getEvery planet's current state and its next station, computed live for any date
• CostFree — no account required

⚠️ Nothing actually moves backwards. A planet is retrograde when its apparent longitude is decreasing as seen from Earth — an appearance produced by the Earth overtaking it on the inside of the track, the way a car you pass seems to slide backwards. Umbriel says this plainly, because the mechanism is the antidote to most of what gets written about retrogrades.

The traditional reading is a review window: a stretch better suited to revisiting, revising and double-checking than to launching. That is a useful frame and it is not a prohibition on living your life.

Every planet's state and its next station — the moment it appears to stop and turn — are computed live rather than read from a stored table, so the page is right for any date and never goes stale.

Mercury is the famous one, three or four times a year, but the outer planets spend months of every year retrograde, which is worth knowing before treating the state itself as an event.

Pluto is retrograde for roughly half of every year, Neptune and Uranus for about five months each. If retrograde motion were inherently disruptive, most of the calendar would be disrupted most of the time — which is the plainest argument for reading a station, the turn itself, as the moment worth marking rather than the long stretch either side of it.

A planet is retrograde when its apparent longitude is decreasing as seen from Earth, which is an appearance rather than a reversal: the planet does not slow down, the Earth overtakes it on the inside. The stations are found by locating the sign change in daily motion and refining by bisection, so the turn is reported to the day rather than to the nearest week. Every planet's current state and its next station are computed live rather than read from a stored table, which is why the page works for any date and does not go stale. A station is found by locating the day the sign of the daily motion changes and then bisecting inside it, so the turn is dated to the day rather than to the nearest week — the distinction matters because a planet's apparent motion is close to zero on either side of a station, and a coarse scan can miss the crossing entirely or place it days out. The same solver serves the year-ahead timeline, so the two views are guaranteed to agree.