Midpoints
The degree halfway between two planets is a point in its own right. This page finds every midpoint in your chart and the planets that stand on them, and draws them on the 90° dial the method was worked with.
On the picked axis
Midpoint pictures
Every midpoint, in dial order
What a midpoint is
A midpoint is the degree exactly halfway between two planets, measured the short way round the circle. The idea is old, but it was Alfred Witte and the Hamburg school, in the 1920s, who put midpoints at the centre of a method, and Reinhold Ebertin who set that method out for general use in The Combination of Stellar Influences, first published in German in 1940. Ebertin wrote a planet standing on a midpoint as Sun = Moon/Venus and read the three together. The far midpoint, opposite the near one, counts as the same point.
Using the dial
Choose your birth, if a chart is saved on this device, or today’s sky. Each point stands at its place on the dial, with a small pin at the exact degree. Pick a point, or tab to it and press Enter, and the page draws its axis across the dial and a chord for every pair balanced either side of it; the line under the dial and the list below name each pair, the angle it makes and how far it is from exact. The arrow keys step from point to point. Underneath come the counts, the Sun/Moon midpoint and anything standing on it, every midpoint picture, and a table of all the midpoints in dial order.
How the dial works on this page
Every position is taken modulo ninety degrees and spread round the whole dial, so 5° Aries sits at 5, in the same place as 5° Cancer, 5° Libra and 5° Capricorn. The first third of the dial holds the cardinal signs, the second the fixed and the last the mutable. A picture is counted when a point is within 1.5° of a midpoint at any multiple of 45°: on it, 45°, 90° or 135° from it, or opposite it, which are exactly the places the dial folds together. With a birth time the ascendant and midheaven join the ten bodies, which makes 66 midpoints; without one there are 45, and the Moon, worked out for midday, may be several degrees out. Positions come from the same astronomy as the charts on this site.
Working one out by hand
Say the Sun is at 10° Aries and the Moon at 20° Gemini. In plain longitude that is 10° and 80°, so the midpoint the short way round is 45°, which is 15° Taurus, and the far midpoint is 15° Scorpio. On the dial both sit at 45. Now put Mars at 14° Leo, which is 134° of longitude and 44 on the dial. It is 89° from the midpoint, one degree from an exact square and inside the 1.5° orb, so the page lists Mars = Sun/Moon, 90° from the midpoint, 1°00′ off. A planet at 0° Cancer would sit at 0 on the dial, straight across from 45: it is 45° from the midpoint, and that counts too.
Choices that change the list
Midpoint work has more settings than most of astrology, and two programs rarely list quite the same pictures. The orb is the first: this page uses 1.5°, close to what Ebertin worked with, and a wider orb finds more. The angles are the second: some astrologers count only the conjunction and the opposition, some add the square, and the 90° dial brings in 45° and 135° as well, which is what this page counts. The birth time is the third: without one the ascendant and midheaven drop out, and the Moon, which moves about half a degree an hour, can be out by more than the orb. Uranian astrology, which grew out of the Hamburg school, also uses eight hypothetical planets, and those are left out here.
The composite chart, which puts the midpoint of each pair of planets from two charts on one wheel, is on Composite. The angles midpoints are measured with are described on The aspects, larger figures such as T-squares on Aspect patterns, and the mirror points across the solstice axis, another way of pairing degrees, on Antiscia.
What it claims
The tradition reads a planet on a midpoint as tying the pair to its own theme, and Ebertin treated the Sun/Moon midpoint as one of the most sensitive points in a chart, read in connection with close relationships. Schools differ on the orb and on which angles count, so the pictures listed here depend on those choices, which are stated above. This is a measuring method and the vocabulary that goes with it, set out as a description, and the page predicts nothing.
Questions people ask
What is a midpoint in astrology?
A midpoint is the degree exactly halfway between two planets or points, measured the short way round the zodiac; the degree opposite it counts as the same axis. With the Sun at 10 degrees Aries and the Moon at 20 degrees Gemini, the midpoint is 15 degrees Taurus. Astrologers read a planet standing on a midpoint as linking the pair, and write it as, for example, Mars = Sun/Moon. This page finds every midpoint in a chart and every planet standing on one.
How do you read a 90-degree dial?
The dial wraps the zodiac round itself four times, so one full circle stands for ninety degrees. Positions a conjunction, a square or an opposition apart then share one place, and positions 45 or 135 degrees apart sit directly across from each other. A point with a pair of others spaced evenly either side of its axis stands on their midpoint, which is why pictures are easy to spot. The cardinal signs fill the first third of the dial, the fixed the second and the mutable the last.
What is a midpoint picture?
A midpoint picture, or planetary picture, is a point standing on the midpoint of two others, within a small orb and at a multiple of 45 degrees: on it, square to it, opposite it, or 45 or 135 degrees away. Ebertin wrote it in the form A = B/C. This page counts a picture within 1.5 degrees and lists every one in your chart or in today’s sky, with the angle and how far each is from exact.
What is the Sun/Moon midpoint?
It is the degree halfway between the Sun and the Moon in a chart. Reinhold Ebertin treated it as one of the most sensitive points a chart has and read it in connection with close relationships. This page marks it with a diamond on the dial, gives its degree, and lists any point within 1.5 degrees of it at a multiple of 45 degrees. Without a birth time the Moon, and so this midpoint, may be several degrees out.