Birth chart
the full map of the sky when you were born

A birth chart, also called a natal chart, is a snapshot of the sky at the exact moment and place you were born. It records which sign and house each of the ten planets was in, the angles (aspects) the planets made to each other, and which sign was rising over the eastern horizon. That last one is your rising sign, or ascendant.

A magazine horoscope works only with the position of the Sun, so everyone with the same sign shares the same text. A birth chart is as individual as a fingerprint. Move the birth time by a few minutes and the rising sign, the house boundaries, and the feel of the whole chart can change. That’s why a chart is calculated from your birth date, time, and place, not just your sign.

We calculate the full chart with the Swiss Ephemeris, the professional standard for planetary positions. Your chart includes:

• 10 planets in signs and houses: the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, each with its exact degree and a note if it’s retrograde.
• Rising sign and Midheaven: the front door of the chart (how you come across) and its highest point (where your career is headed), calculated from your birth time.
• 12 houses in the Placidus system: the most widely used system in Western astrology. Each house covers one area of life: money, communication, home, relationships, career, and so on.
• Aspects with orbs: conjunctions, oppositions, trines, squares, and sextiles between planets, with the exact orb and whether the aspect is still forming or already separating.

You see the whole chart as a wheel, the same kind professional astrology software draws, and next to it a list of every position with an explanation of what it means.

Plenty of calculators can draw a chart. The difference is what happens next. Here, your birth chart produces a personal horoscope every day: the current transits (where the planets are right now, compared with your chart) are turned into connected, natural text, not a table of symbols to decode by yourself.

The same chart drives your weekly and monthly readings, your erotic horoscope, and Astra, the guide who knows your chart and answers questions about your situation.

To be honest about it: if all you want is a quick chart with no account, there are good free calculators for that. Our strength is the reading, so you can understand your chart without studying astrology.

The rising sign moves about one degree every four minutes, so it passes through a whole sign in roughly two hours. A chart calculated for “sometime around noon” can have a different rising sign and different houses than one from the exact time. Check your birth certificate. If the time isn’t on it, the hospital or the records office where you were born may have it.

And if you don’t know your birth time at all? That’s fine. You mark that in your profile, we use noon as a neutral midpoint, and the reading skips the rising sign and houses. Your Sun and planets stay reliable, and the Moon’s sign usually does too.