Why It Means That: Twelve Things the Sky Actually Does
Every one of these is a fact about the sky rather than an opinion about you, and every one of them ends, inside the app, in a number taken from your own chart. Nothing here needs an account, and nothing here is a prediction — they are the working, shown.
Why is 23°26′ the limit?
Because that is the tilt of the Earth. Our axis leans about 23°26′ out of the plane we orbit in, and the Sun's yearly climb north and fall south is that lean, seen from here. At the June solstice the Sun stands directly over the Tropic of Cancer and stops; at the December one, over Capricorn. It has never been further, and it cannot be.
Why: Everything else is on its own tilted path on top of that one. The Moon's is inclined about 5.1°, so when its own tilt stacks on the Earth's it can reach past 28°, well outside anything the Sun has ever done. A body over the line is out of bounds: still in the zodiac, still in a sign, but at a declination the Sun's own year has no address for.
Find the date it crossed back. Out of bounds is a spell with two ends, not a permanent condition, and knowing where you sat inside that spell tells you more than the label does.
Does a retrograde planet really go backwards?
No. Nothing in the solar system reverses, not for a day. What happens is that we are watching from a moving vehicle. The Earth goes round the Sun faster than everything outside it and slower than the two inside it, so when we overtake Mars on the inside of the track, or Mercury overtakes us, the other body appears to slow, stop, slide backwards against the fixed stars, stop again and resume. Exactly the way a slower car appears to roll backwards as you pass it.
Why: It is an appearance, and it is also a real position: where a planet <em>appears</em> to be is what a chart is made of, and a body tracing a loop over the same stretch of zodiac three times is genuinely doing something a direct one is not. The two stations, where it stops, are the sharpest moments of the whole loop, because that is where its apparent motion is nearest to nothing.
Look at the degree it turned rather than the degree it was born on. A retrograde planet crosses its own station degree three times, and that degree is the one the loop was actually about.
What is the North Node actually a node of?
A crossing. The Moon does not orbit in the same plane the Earth orbits the Sun in: its path is tilted about 5.1°, so for half of each month the Moon is above the Sun's path and for the other half below it. The two points where it cuts through are the nodes, and the North Node is the one where the Moon is coming <em>up</em> into the north. It is not a body. There is nothing there. It is an intersection of two planes.
Why: It is also why eclipses are rare. A New Moon only darkens the Sun when it happens near a node, because only there are the three of them actually in line rather than merely in the same direction. And the whole axis drifts backwards through the zodiac, one full turn in about 18.61 years, which is why the node comes home near 18, 37 and 55, and why those ages keep turning up in people's accounts of their own lives.
Work out the dates of your own nodal returns, then go and look at what you were doing. It is one of the few claims in astrology that is cheap to test against your own history, because the date is arithmetic and nobody chose it.
Why does a sign start on a different day some years?
Because the year does not divide. A tropical year — equinox to equinox — is about 365.2422 days, not 365, so the Sun arrives back at the same point of the zodiac roughly six hours later every year. Three years of that is eighteen hours, and then a leap day pulls the calendar forward and the whole thing snaps back. That is why the boundary wanders over about two days and never settles.
Why: A sign is a 30° arc of the Sun's own path, measured from the equinox, so a sign boundary is a moment, not a date. Somebody born on the boundary day is not between signs: the Sun was on one side of that instant, and there is a minute you can name. Almanacs print a date because a date fits in a table.
Find the minute the Sun entered your sign, and how far into it you were born. If it is under a day, you are one of the people a printed date gets wrong.
Why is “cazimi” seventeen arcminutes?
Because that is the edge of the Sun. Its disc is about half a degree wide from here, so from the centre to the rim is about sixteen arcminutes, and seventeen is that rounded outward. A planet closer than this to the Sun's place is not near it in the poetic sense: it is in front of the disc, or behind it. The figure moves a little through the year, because the Earth's orbit is an ellipse and the Sun really is bigger in our sky in January than in July.
Why: The other two distances in the same sentence are not measurements at all, and it is worth knowing which is which. Combust (inside 8°) and under the beams (inside 15°) are old rules about when a body is lost in the glare near dawn — about eyesight, and how bright the sky is that close to the Sun. They are judgements that have been handed down. Only cazimi has an edge you can point a telescope at.
Find the planet nearest your Sun, and how many arcminutes away it was. Then compare it with the number below, which is the size of the Sun's own disc on your day rather than on an average one.
Where is the middle of the galaxy, and does it move?
It is a radio source called Sagittarius A*, and from here it lies at about 27° of Sagittarius — but that figure has a date on it. The whole zodiac is measured from the equinox, and the equinox slides backwards against the stars by about 50 arcseconds a year. So the galactic centre creeps forward through the signs at roughly a degree every seventy-two years, and the number in a book printed in 1975 is not the number for a chart cast today.
Why: It is also 5°36′ off the ecliptic, which is the part usually left out. Longitude is a shadow cast onto the plane the Earth goes round in, and the centre of the galaxy is well below that plane. A planet at the same longitude is at the same <em>place in the zodiac</em>, which is what the tradition means, and is still more than five degrees away from it in the actual sky.
Look at what of yours is inside a degree of the figure below. If nothing is, that is an answer too: most charts have nothing there, and a note that found something in every chart would not be measuring anything.
Why twenty-nine, and why does it sometimes happen three times?
Because Saturn takes 29.46 years to go round the Sun, so it comes back to the degree it held on the day you were born at about twenty-nine and a half, and again at about fifty-nine. That is the whole of the arithmetic. It is a moment, not a season: the instant Saturn's longitude is back where it started.
Why: And it can be three moments. Saturn appears to stop and go backwards for about four and a half months of every year — the Earth overtaking it on the inside — so if one of those loops happens to fall across your degree, Saturn crosses it going forward, crosses it again going back, and crosses it a third time going forward. The return is then a span of nine or ten months with three exact dates inside it, and the middle one is the retrograde pass.
Look at the dates below. If yours has three, the whole passage is the span between the first and the last, not the first one.
Why are there two Liliths, and which is the real one?
Neither is a body. The Moon goes round the Earth on an ellipse, and an ellipse has two foci: the Earth sits at one and the other is empty. Black Moon Lilith is the direction of that empty point. It is a consequence of the Moon's orbit rather than a thing anybody has photographed, which is why no telescope will ever settle an argument about it.
Why: There are two of them because there are two honest ways to ask where the empty focus is. Mean Lilith uses the Moon's smoothed average orbit, so it moves steadily and is what almost every chart means. True (osculating) Lilith uses the actual ellipse of that exact moment, which the Sun is constantly pulling out of shape, so it lurches forwards and backwards and can sit almost a whole sign away from the mean one — measured over fifteen years of daily charts, up to 29.9°. Your chart prints both, and they are not a disagreement: they are two different questions.
Compare the two figures below. If they are far apart, your birth fell during one of the true focus's swings, and any reading built on one of them says something different from the same reading built on the other.
Why is the Moon I was born under just a subtraction?
Because that is all a phase is. Stand on the Earth and look at the Moon and the Sun: the angle between them decides how much of the lit half you can see. At 0° the Moon is between us and the Sun and its lit face is turned away — New. At 180° we are in the middle and the whole lit face is towards us — Full. Every name in between is just a reading of that one angle, and the angle is your Moon's degree minus your Sun's degree.
Why: The Moon gains about 12.19° a day on the Sun, and so laps it every 29.53 days. That is the whole clock. But the eight phase names split those 360° into 45° bands, which means a name is a neighbourhood roughly 3.7 days wide, not a moment. “First quarter” is exactly true at 90.000° and is still called first quarter a day and a half either side. So the number below is the honest version of your phase, and the name is the label it happens to fall under.
Take the two degrees off your own chart and subtract them. The answer is the figure below, and it is the same subtraction every almanac in history has made.
Why is Venus never overhead at midnight?
Because Venus orbits inside ours. From here it can never appear far from the Sun — measured over thirty years, never more than about 47° — so it is only ever low in the east before sunrise or low in the west after sunset. There is no arrangement of the solar system that puts it overhead at midnight, and the same is true of Mercury, which is closer in and never gets even that far.
Why: Which side of the Sun it sits on is the whole of the old distinction. East of the Sun it sets after it, and it is the evening star. West of the Sun it rises before it, and it is the morning star. Venus laps us every 583.92 days, and five of those laps take 2,919.60 days while eight years take 2,921.94 — so the arrangement almost repeats every eight years, and the five meeting points trace the figure people call the pentagram. Almost: it slips 2.34 days each time, which is why the figure turns slowly rather than closing.
Find your Venus and your Sun below. Whichever side of the Sun your Venus is on is the side you would have seen it on, if you had been outside and looking.
Was there an eclipse before I was born, and where did it fall?
There was, and there always is. Eclipses come four to seven times a year, in pairs a fortnight apart and seasons about six months apart, so no birth is more than a few months downstream of one. The last before you is not a symbol anybody chose: it is a dated event at a real degree, solved from the geometry rather than looked up in a list.
Why: An eclipse is a New or Full Moon that happens near a lunar node, where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's. Both conditions are needed, and checking only the first is the classic error: every New Moon is an alignment, but only the ones near a node put a shadow on anything. The same geometry recurs about every eighteen years and eleven days — the saros — so an eclipse degree has relatives that far before and after it.
Take the degree below and look for what sits near it in your own chart. The tradition reads the prenatal eclipse as a place the year of your birth was already pointing at; whether that means anything is yours to decide, and the date and the degree are simply true either way.
Which star was rising when I was born?
Somewhere over your birthplace, a fixed star was crossing the horizon or the meridian at the same moment as one of your planets. That coincidence is a paran, and it is the oldest way stars were read — older than giving them zodiac degrees, which came later and throws away the thing that makes them stars.
Why: This is the one part of a chart that truly depends on where you were. A planet's zodiac longitude is the same number whether you were born in Montana or in Cairo. Whether a star and a planet touch the horizon together is not: it depends on your latitude and on the real positions of both, which is why Umbriel works parans out from right ascension and declination, precessed to your date, rather than from longitude.
The star below has a real brightness and a real place in the sky. Look up where it is tonight — it is the same star, and it has moved by an amount somebody could measure.
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These twelve are computed, not quoted: each figure is worked out from the same engine that draws the charts, and each is checked against a second, slower path before it is allowed to appear. See how Umbriel is checked.