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a natal chart looks like a pie cut into twelve slices, with little symbols scattered round the crust. most people learn what the symbols mean long before anyone tells them where they’re standing. so this page does that part first: in the wheel below, you’re the sparkle in the middle.

the easiest way to feel this is to put the sun on the wheel and let a day go by. the wheel starts at midnight, with the sun underfoot near the bottom. press play and it rises on the left, at the ascendant, your eastern horizon; climbs to the midheaven, overhead, around noon; sets on the right, at the descendant, in the west; and spends the night under the earth again, all without leaving its sign. what changes is the sky behind it: keep an eye on the clock under the slider, and the rising sign changes about every two hours. that’s why the birth time matters so much.

the two big buttons show the same day from either side. the sky turns is what you see from the ground: your horizon holds still and the signs roll past it. the earth turns is the way a whole sign chart is drawn: the signs sit one to a house, and your horizon swings through the rising sign until the next sign takes over the 1st.

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a chart is a picture of the sky from one spot on the earth, at one moment: wherever you were born, the minute you arrived. the tool starts as that sky, a sphere all round you, above and below, with the horizon spread out at your feet like a disc and the zodiac running round the sphere like a belt. press it flat and watch where everything goes. the disc of the horizon closes into the line across the middle of the chart, sky above it and under the earth below. the belt becomes the ring round the edge. east lands on the left, overhead at the top, west on the right and underfoot at the bottom (why east ends up on the left is the next section). that’s all a chart is: the whole sky round you, pressed flat.

so the very middle of the wheel isn’t a planet or a sign. it’s you, standing on the ground, looking up. that’s why the earth never turns up in a chart as a planet: it isn’t somewhere in the sky, it’s the ground the whole chart is seen from.

why is the earth in the middle at all? not by mistake. ptolemy put it there on purpose, because next to the heavens the earth is no bigger than a point, and from anywhere on it the sky looks the way it would from the very centre. the earth page has the rest of that story.

this is the bit that trips everyone up. on a map, east is on the right. on a chart, east is on the left. nobody made a mistake.

a map is drawn as if you’re looking down at the ground from above. a chart is drawn as if you’re standing up, facing south, looking at the sky. face south and the sun comes up on your left, in the east. it climbs to its highest point in front of you, goes down on your right, in the west, and then carries on round under your feet through the night.

the picture above shows the whole trick: take the map’s compass and turn it upside down. south goes to the top, north to the bottom, and east and west swap sides. so the left edge of the chart is the eastern horizon, where things rise: the ascendant (ASC), where the sun comes up. the top is the highest part of the sky, the midheaven (MC), where the sun stands at noon. the right edge is the western horizon, where things set: the descendant (DSC), sunset. the bottom is the point under the earth, the IC, where the sun is at midnight. if you were born south of the equator the noon sun stands to the north of you, but the chart is drawn the same way anyway, with the ascendant on the left and the midheaven at the top.

the old astrologers called the ascendant the hour-marker, the thing that marks the hour you were born, and called the four of them together the pivots: the hinges the whole chart turns on.

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the day wheel at the top of the page shows primary motion: the whole sky turning past you once a day, every sign and planet rising in the east and setting in the west together. secondary motion is the slow one underneath it.

this wheel holds the daily turn still, the same sky each night, and steps a day at a time. press play the month and watch the dots: each planet creeps the other way, counterclockwise through the signs, on its own clock. the moon crosses a whole sign every two and a half days and goes round in a month. the sun moves about a degree a day and takes a year. saturn barely seems to move at all: it takes nearly thirty. the date box counts the days, and the earth’s shadow turns a little each day, because it always faces away from the sun.

primary motion is why your birth time matters. secondary motion is why your birthday does, and it’s what transits are made of.

the twelve slices are the houses. the old texts call them the places. in whole sign houses, which is what this site uses, each house is one whole sign. the sign on the eastern horizon is the first house, and you count from there, counterclockwise, down under the horizon and back up the other side: the second house, the third, and round to the twelfth. that is why there are twelve of them and not some other number: the houses were made to sit on the signs.

on the wheel above, each slice carries its topics, the things that house is about, and round the rim the old name it went by. point at a slice and the middle tells you more: its number, its old name, a memory hook to keep it in your head, and where it sits. the grey ring round the middle sorts the houses three ways: angular, on the four angles; succedent, the ones that follow them; and cadent, the ones falling away. click the hearts in the middle and the rim swaps every old name for its memory hook.

the four angles are points, not houses. the ascendant always falls in the first house, because the rising sign is what makes a house the first. the midheaven has no fixed seat. depending on where and when you were born, it usually lands in the ninth, tenth or eleventh house. houses versus signs goes further.

once you know where you’re standing, the rest is labels, and the biggest is the band round the outside: the zodiac. the sign wheel above is that band on its own, laid out as the year: aries on the left, where spring begins, and round through the seasons, one sign to a slice, each glyph in its element’s colour (red for fire, green for earth, gold for air, blue for water). point at a sign and the middle tells you about it: its line, its mode and element, and where the light stands at that time of year. point at an element in a corner and its three signs light up, joined in a triangle.

on a full chart, the symbols just inside the band are the planets, each with a small tick on the rim marking the exact spot it was at and a number saying how far into its sign it had got, from 0 to 29. the lines across the middle are the aspects: two planets a third of the circle apart make a trine, a quarter apart a square, opposite sides an opposition. on the profiles you can hover anything on the wheel and it will tell you what it is.

everything on this page that depends on the horizon depends on the hour. without a birth time the planets’ signs are still right, because they barely move in a day, but nobody knows which sign was rising, so the houses and the four angles can’t be trusted. you can see it on the first wheel at the top of the page: drag the slider through a day and the sun never leaves its sign, but the rising sign in the clock changes about every two hours. a chart like that is drawn for noon and says so. every profile on this site carries a rodden rating, which is a grade for how good the birth time is.

plenty. most of the time the planets’ signs still hold, and so do the aspects between them, each planet’s dignity, and every transit to them, so most of what a planet is and how it’s doing is still there. the exception is a planet sitting right on the edge between two signs: there the hour can decide which side it’s on, and we don’t do cusps here, so it’s one sign or the other. the one to check first is the moon: it changes sign every two and a half days, so on some birthdays it did, and you’d want to read both.

what goes missing is everything tied to the horizon: the rising sign, the houses, the four angles, and sect, whether the chart is a day or a night one. there are ways round it:

• a solar chart: the houses counted from the sun’s own sign, a stand-in that still gives them a shape.
• a rough window: knowing you were born in the morning, or after dark, settles sect and narrows the rising sign to a few. set the first wheel’s slider to that stretch of the day and watch which signs come up.
• the records: birth certificates, hospital records and family memories are worth asking for.
• rectification: working backward from the events of a life to the birth time that fits them, for instance by watching slow planets cross the angles. it’s a specialty of its own, and not one offered here: some astrologers do little else, so look for one who specializes in it.