What is backwards, and when

Reading the page, step by step

The list at the top goes through the eight planets that can be retrograde, Mercury out to Pluto. For each it says whether it is going backwards now and in which sign, with the date it turned and the date it turns again, or, if it is moving forwards, the date its next retrograde begins when that falls inside the chart. The chart runs for fourteen months from two months ago. Each bar is one retrograde, from the station where the planet appears to stop and turn back to the station where it moves forwards again, and the upright line marks today. Choose a bar and its loop is drawn below: the road the planet travelled, with a mark every ten days that bunches up at the stations, where it hardly moves. The Sun and the Moon are not listed because, seen from the Earth, they never go backwards.

An example, and the shadow

Read a Mercury line like this. The first date is the station retrograde, when Mercury appears to stand still and turn back. For about three weeks it slides back along the zodiac, and the caption under its loop says by how many degrees and through which sign. The second date is the station direct, after which it moves forwards again, and some days later it passes the degree where it first turned.

Some astrologers speak of a shadow: the days before a retrograde when the planet first crosses the degrees it is about to go back over, and the days afterwards when it crosses them for the third time. The page does not list shadow dates, but the loop draws that stretch of sky, and the ten-day marks show how long each crossing took.

How long each one lasts

Mercury goes retrograde about three times a year, for roughly three weeks each time. Venus does it least often, for about six weeks every nineteen months, and Mars for around ten weeks roughly every twenty-six months. From Jupiter outwards a retrograde comes once a year and lasts longer the further out the planet is: about four months for Jupiter, four and a half for Saturn, and about five for Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, which spend around two-fifths of every year going backwards. That is why the headline so often names at least one of them.

Dates, time zones and the stations

Dates are given in this device’s time zone. A station late in the evening in London can fall on the next day in Sydney, so a calendar set to another zone may be a day out from this one without either being wrong. A planet at its station also barely moves for a day or two either side; the page finds the turn to within a minute so that nothing is rounded twice, but the day is the honest unit.

Mercury’s three loops a year, and when it shows as a morning or evening star, are on Mercury cycle. Venus’s retrogrades, five in eight years, draw the rose on Venus cycle. Every station of the year sits alongside the eclipses and changes of sign on the Almanac, and what each planet stands for is on The planets.

What retrograde actually is

Nothing about the planet changes. The Earth is on a shorter, faster orbit, and when it overtakes an outer planet that planet appears to slide backwards against the stars for a while — the same way a train you are passing seems to run backwards through the window. Mercury and Venus, which are inside our orbit, do it as they swing between us and the Sun. It is a trick of where we are standing. Copernicus explained it this way in 1543; astronomers had predicted retrogrades for two thousand years before.

That is also why this page can be computed instead of looked up. Every date here comes from one quantity: how fast a body is moving along the ecliptic. Where that speed passes through zero the planet stations, and between a station backwards and a station forwards it is retrograde. A run in 2043 is worked out as exactly as the one next month.

What a retrograde is supposed to do to a week is a different question, and not one this page answers. There is no measured effect of Mercury on contracts, travel or electronics; what there is, is a long tradition of treating the period as a time to go back over things rather than start them. You are welcome to that as a frame. It is not a forecast, and nothing here will tell you what is going to happen.