☉ Free Solar Return Chart Calculator

Umbriel's free solar return calculator casts your birthday chart for the exact moment the Sun returns to the degree it held at your birth, which is often not on your birthday.

A solar return is the chart for the moment the Sun comes back to its exact natal degree, which happens once a year and is read as a chart for the year ahead. It is one of the oldest predictive techniques still in general use, and one of the few that produces a whole chart, not a single indication.

It is usually not on your birthday. The Sun's return lands a little before or after the calendar date, sometimes by a day, because a tropical year is not a whole number of days and leap years shunt it about. Anyone who casts the chart for midnight on their birthday is casting a different chart, often with a completely different Ascendant, since the angles move a degree every four minutes.

The second question is where. Traditionally the return is cast for the birthplace; a widespread modern practice is to cast it for wherever you happen to be at that moment, which changes the houses and the angles entirely while leaving the planets alone. Some astrologers travel deliberately on that basis. There is no settled answer, so Umbriel lets you set the location and see what changes rather than deciding for you.

The solar return is the moment in a chosen year when the Sun is back at the exact tropical longitude it had at your birth, and Umbriel then casts a full chart for that moment. The natal Sun is taken from your birth chart, and the search starts from your birthday in the target year at your birth clock time in UT. It then takes up to eight correction steps, each dividing the remaining gap by the Sun's mean motion of about 0.9856 degrees a day, and stops when the apparent Sun is within 0.00001 degrees of the target. The moment is kept to the whole minute (seconds are dropped), and the chart is cast for it at the birthplace on this page, with your chosen house system and zodiac. The return moment does not depend on where you are, since the Sun's longitude is the same everywhere, but the return Ascendant and houses depend entirely on where the chart is cast. Without a birth time the natal Sun is known only to about half a degree, which is half a day of the Sun's travel, so the return moment is uncertain by about twelve hours and Umbriel shows no return Ascendant or houses. The accuracy page gives the Sun as under 1 arcsecond from NASA/JPL Horizons across 1650 to 2050 and the Ascendant and Midheaven as within 0.5 arcminutes, and those figures cover the return moment and its angles once the birth time is right. A few minutes' error in the birth time barely moves the natal Sun, but the angles of the return chart still turn with the clock.