Planetary Positions Today

01

How to read planetary positions today

Each row places one body in the tropical zodiac. The position column reads as degrees and minutes inside a sign, so 14°14′ Aries means the body is a little over fourteen degrees into the thirty that make up Aries.

Daily motion is how far it travels along the ecliptic in twenty-four hours, and it is the number that tells you how long a contact lasts. The Moon covers twelve to fifteen degrees a day, so its transits are over within hours; Pluto moves a fiftieth of a degree and can hold the same point for a year. A negative value means retrograde, marked with an R.

02

Geocentric, tropical, and stated in UTC

Three conventions decide the numbers, and sites make different choices, which is why two ephemerides can disagree by a whole sign. These readings are geocentric — measured from the centre of the Earth, the standard for Western astrology — and use the tropical zodiac, anchored to the equinox rather than to the constellations.

The timestamp is UTC. A planet's zodiacal position depends only on when you look, never on where you stand, so one UTC reading is correct everywhere on Earth. Your location starts to matter only when houses and angles enter the picture, which is what a birth chart adds.

The node shown is the true node, which wobbles and can briefly turn direct. Ephemerides publishing the mean node differ by up to about a degree and a half.

03

What retrograde actually means

Retrograde motion is a trick of perspective, not a change in behaviour. Every planet keeps orbiting the Sun the same way throughout. When Earth overtakes a slower outer planet, that planet appears to slide backwards against the stars for a few weeks, the way a car you pass seems to drift backwards against the trees.

The retrograde column is therefore derived rather than looked up: each body's longitude a day before is compared with a day after, and a negative difference is the definition. Worth knowing which planet is involved, too — Mercury gets the attention, but Saturn, Neptune, Pluto and Chiron each spend four to five months a year retrograde, so "something is retrograde" is nearly always true and nearly never the interesting part.

04

Turning planetary positions into your own transits

This table is the sky as it stands for everyone. It turns personal only when laid over your birth chart: a transit is a body making an angle to a point in your own chart, so a position on its own says nothing about your week. Mars at 6° Cancer is neutral until you know whether you have anything near 6° of Cancer, Capricorn, Aries or Libra.

Generate your birth chart, note the degrees of your Sun, Moon and Ascendant, then scan for bodies within a few degrees of them. The daily-motion column tells you how long each contact lasts — a fast body within one degree is a two-day event, while a slow retrograde body crosses the same point three times across most of a year.

• Same degree, same sign — the strongest and most literal contact.
• Same degree, opposite sign — tension that tends to arrive through other people.
• Same degree, four signs away — the easy one, often unnoticed.
• Same degree, three signs away — the friction that forces a decision.

05

Where today's positions meet the place you live

An astrocartography map starts from these same positions, then adds the Earth's rotation to ask a different question: not what sign a planet occupies, but which places on Earth have it rising or overhead. Your own lines are fixed for life because they come from your birth moment, while the positions above keep moving — and how they fall against your lines is what makes one year better than another for acting on a particular city.

Planetary positions today — common questions