Solar return

Why it is not always on your birthday

The calendar year is 365 days and the Sun’s year about 365 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes. So the moment the Sun gets back to your degree runs nearly six hours later every year, crosses into the next day, and is pulled back by a day each time a leap day comes round. The drawing above shows that saw-tooth for your own degree. Somebody born close to midnight often has their return the day before or after the birthday.

Why the place matters

The minute is the same everywhere on Earth. The chart is not: the rising sign and the houses depend on where you stand, so a return cast for Lisbon and one cast for Tokyo share every planet’s degree and little else. Some astrologers use the birthplace every year, and more use wherever the birthday is actually spent. This page uses the place you give it, and starts from the one kept on this device.

How it is read

The return’s rising sign, the house the Sun falls in and any planet close to one of the four angles are the parts a return is traditionally read around, as a picture of what the year is about. That is the practice, described here. Nothing on this page predicts what the year will bring.

How the page finds the minute

It starts from the Sun’s longitude in the birth chart kept on this device. For the year you choose it takes the eight days around the birthday, four either side, inside which the Sun must cross that degree, and halves the interval forty-four times, which pins the crossing far closer than a second. The moment is rounded to the minute and a full chart is cast for it at the place you give, with Placidus houses as in the birth chart, or whole signs at latitudes where Placidus cannot be drawn. The time is shown by the clock of that place when its time zone is known, and by this device’s clock otherwise.

Reading the result, with an example

Under the wheel the page picks out four things: the rising sign of the return, the house the Sun falls in, the Moon’s sign and house, and any planet within five degrees of the ascendant, descendant, midheaven or IC.

Say the Sun stood at 14°20′ Leo at birth, and in the chosen year it comes back to that degree at 21:40 on 6 August by the clock in London. Cast for Tokyo, the same instant is 05:40 on 7 August. Every planet keeps its degree, but a different part of the zodiac is rising, and the houses and angles move with it. The drawing under the chart shows the same birthday over sixteen years: each year the minute comes about six hours later, until a leap day pulls it back.

Birth time and other snags

The return is only as exact as the birth time. The Sun moves about a degree a day, so a birth time an hour out moves the birth degree by about two and a half minutes of arc and the return by about an hour. Without a birth time the page uses midday, and the return can then be up to half a day out: enough to change the rising sign, the houses and the Moon’s place, though the slower planets hold.

Somebody born on 29 February still has a return every year, because the page looks for the Sun’s degree rather than the date. And a return just after midnight in one place is just before midnight somewhere to the west, so the date it is given depends on the clock it is read by.

The birth chart the page starts from is on the front page, and the rising sign it turns on is explained on Rising sign. The Lunar return does for each month what this page does for each year, Profections give each year of life a house and a planet, and Returns follows the slower comebacks of Jupiter, Saturn and the nodes.