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Astrology
Your Birth Chart
A birth chart is a map of the sky at the moment you were born, seen from the place you were born. Enter the date, the time and the place, and the chart is drawn for you.
Learn to read it
How it works
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Enter the date and time
Use the time on your birth certificate or in the hospital record. Enter it as the clock showed it that day. Daylight saving time is worked out for you.
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Choose the place
Pick the country, then type the name of the city or town. The place gives the chart its latitude, its longitude and its time zone.
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See the wheel
The chart is drawn with the rising sign on the left. Under it is every planet and point with its sign, its degree and its house. Tap one to read its meaning.
About the birth chart
What the wheel shows
The outer ring is the zodiac, twelve signs of thirty degrees each. The symbols inside the ring are the Sun, the Moon, the eight planets, the Moon's north node, Chiron, the Black Moon Lilith and the Part of Fortune, each placed at the degree of the zodiac it occupied when you were born. A small R beside a planet means it was retrograde, moving backwards through the zodiac as seen from Earth.
The numbered sections are the twelve houses. The first house begins at the Ascendant, the degree that was rising over the eastern horizon, and the chart is turned so that this point sits on the left. The Midheaven, marked Mc, is the degree that stood highest in the sky. It begins the tenth house.
The lines across the middle are aspects, the angles between planets. Red lines join planets about 90 or 180 degrees apart, a square or an opposition. Blue lines join planets about 120 degrees apart, a trine, and green lines join planets about 60 degrees apart, a sextile.
How the chart is calculated
The positions are tropical, measured from the spring equinox, as in Western astrology. They are geocentric and apparent: the sky as it looked from Earth. The ephemeris is Astronomy Engine, an open-source library tested against NASA's data, and its positions are good to about one minute of arc. The node is the true node. Chiron comes from NASA JPL's Horizons ephemeris, Lilith is the mean Black Moon, the mean lunar apogee, and the Part of Fortune is the Ascendant plus the Moon minus the Sun by day, with the Sun and the Moon swapped by night.
The houses are Placidus, the system most Western astrologers use. Placidus has no answer inside the polar circles, where some degrees of the zodiac never rise, so a birthplace that far north or south gets Porphyry houses. The list under the chart says which system was used.
The time you enter is local clock time. The page looks up the history of the time zone at your birthplace, including daylight saving and the changes countries have made to their clocks, and converts your birth time to universal time before anything else is calculated. The offset it used is shown with the chart so you can check it.
Why the time matters
The Sun moves one degree a day, so its sign is almost always clear from the date alone. The Moon moves about thirteen degrees a day and can change sign within hours. The Ascendant moves through the whole zodiac in a day, about one degree every four minutes, and the houses move with it. A birth time that is an hour off leaves the planets nearly where they were and puts them in different houses.
Frequently asked questions
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