The year in the sky

What is on it

The Sun’s lane has the four turning points of the year and the day it enters each of the other signs. The Moon’s has every new moon and full moon with the sign it falls in; the quarters are on the Moon calendar. Eclipses have a lane of their own. Each planet from Mercury out has its retrograde stretches and the days it changes sign, including the times a planet slips back into the sign it has just left, which happens when it turns round close to a boundary.

How it is worked out

Every date comes from the same positions as the rest of the site. Sign changes are found by sampling each planet’s longitude and halving down to the minute; stations are where its motion changes direction; the moon phases, eclipses, equinoxes and solstices come straight from the astronomy. Nothing here is copied from a published almanac, which is why a time can differ from one by a minute or two.

What it claims

These are the moments the tradition marks, set out as dates. The page says when they happen and nothing about what they will bring.

Reading one lane, with an example

Take Mercury’s lane. A left-pointing triangle marks the day it stations retrograde, and the line it reads out gives the degree it turned at; the shaded bar runs for the three weeks or so it moves backwards; a right-pointing triangle marks the station direct. If Mercury turned back at 2° Virgo, it would slip back into Leo within about a week, so a Leo glyph would sit inside the bar, listed as ‘Mercury moves back into Leo’, and a Virgo glyph after the bar would mark the day it enters Virgo a second time. The list under the strip gives each of those lines with its day and minute.

Why stations and ingresses matter to astrologers

An ingress is the moment a body enters a sign. Astrology reads the sign a planet is in as the manner it works in, so the date of the change is the date that description shifts. The Sun changes sign about once a month, Jupiter about once a year, Saturn about every two and a half years, and Pluto, on its long and uneven orbit, anything from about twelve to over thirty years. A station is the day a planet seems to stand still before turning round. It lingers near one degree for days, and the tradition gives a degree a planet stations on more weight than one it passes quickly. Neither is a forecast: they are the dates on which the tradition’s descriptions change.

How often the planets turn

Mercury turns retrograde three times a year, occasionally four, for about three weeks; Venus about every nineteen months for around six weeks; Mars about every twenty-six months for two to three months. From Jupiter outwards each planet spends roughly four to five months of every year retrograde, so their bars are long and come round each year a little later than the last. The Sun and the Moon never go backwards, which is why their lanes have no bars. Eclipses come in seasons about six months apart, when a new or full moon falls close to the Moon’s nodes.

The edges of the year

Years from 1901 to 2099 can be shown. A retrograde already running on 1 January, or still running on 31 December, is drawn to the edge of the strip without a triangle at that end, because its station belongs to the neighbouring year. Every time is in the time zone of this device, so a new moon late on the last evening of a month in London can be listed on the first of the next month by a device set further east.

Each planet’s retrogrades are drawn as loops on Backwards, the eclipses with the view from your city on Eclipses, the Moon’s quarters day by day on the Moon calendar, and the Sun’s passage through the signs as a wheel on The year.