How to Read a Birth Chart: Four Steps with a Real Example

To get your birth chart, open the calculator, enter your birth date, time and city, and press "Draw my chart". If you do not know the time, tick "I do not know my birth time". The result has five parts:

• The wheel: the circle with the planets, the ascendant (AC) and the Midheaven (MC). Touch a planet or an aspect line and its meaning appears below.
• Your Big Three: the Sun, the Moon and the rising sign, each with its sign and degree.
• Every placement: a table with the sign, degree and house of each planet.
• Major aspects: pairs of planets, the type of aspect (conjunction, sextile, square, trine, opposition) and its orb.
• House cusps: the sign and degree where each house begins.

In the form, and again below your birth details in the result, you get two choices: the house system (Placidus, whole sign, Koch or equal houses) and the zodiac (tropical or sidereal). The sidereal option is the Vedic chart used in Indian astrology, and it moves most planets back by one sign. Change the house system and the houses in the table change with it. Everything in this guide uses the tropical zodiac and Placidus houses, and where whole sign houses give a different answer, we say so. If the terms are new to you, the glossary entry on the natal chart is a good place to begin. The positions are computed from astronomy, and our accuracy page shows how they compare with NASA JPL and USNO.

To show the steps, we use one example: December 12, 1991, 14:20, Istanbul. By our calculation this chart has the Sun at 19°58′ Sagittarius, the Moon at 29°00′ Aquarius, the rising sign at 10°34′ Taurus and the Midheaven at 22°51′ Capricorn. The planets sit like this:

To compare these numbers with your own chart, look at the "Every placement" table in the calculator. The columns come in the same order.

The big three are the most talked-about part of a chart because they answer three different questions. The Sun sign describes how you express yourself. The Moon sign describes where you feel safe. The rising sign describes how other people see you at first. The three need not share a sign, and most of the time they do not. The big three guide covers each one in depth.

In the example, the Sun is in Sagittarius, the Moon in Aquarius and the rising sign in Taurus. Read one at a time, the three look like a clash: the Sun looks for horizons and meaning while the rising sign gives a steady, unhurried first impression. Astrologers read it as three layers that each do their own job. You come across as calm and reliable (Taurus), you look for ideas and meaning inside (Sagittarius), and emotionally you need a little distance (Aquarius).

One more detail: the Moon is at 29° Aquarius, one degree before Pisces. The Moon moves about 13 degrees a day, so someone born about two hours later would have a Pisces Moon. When the Moon sits this close to a sign boundary, a birth time that is right to the minute really pays off. The post on what your moon sign means explains how the Moon sign works.

If you only want your rising sign, the rising sign calculator finds it on its own, and it too needs an exact birth time. The rising sign guide explains how the ascendant is computed.

Every sign has a ruling planet: Venus for Taurus, Jupiter for Sagittarius, Mars and Pluto for Scorpio, and so on. The ruler of your rising sign is called the chart ruler, and astrologers say its placement shows where the whole chart is headed.

In the example, the rising sign is Taurus, so the ruler is Venus. Venus sits at 7°14′ Scorpio, in the 6th house under Placidus and in the 7th under whole sign houses. This is one of the places where the two systems part ways. With Placidus, Venus lands in the house of work, health and daily rhythm. With whole sign houses, it lands in the house of partnerships and close one-to-one bonds. Venus also makes a square to Saturn with an orb of 3.4 degrees, which we come back to in Step 4.

Your task in this step is to answer three questions. Which sign is the ruler in? Which house? What aspects does it make? Put the answers together and the first impression of the rising sign turns into a story. In the example the story goes like this: someone who looks like a Taurus, loves with the intensity of Scorpio and carries that into daily work or into partnership.

The planets never spread evenly over the twelve houses. At first glance, look at which houses are crowded and which are empty. A crowded house points to an area of life that is always on the agenda. An empty house is read through the planet that rules the sign on its cusp.

In our example, the 8th house under Placidus holds the Sun and Mercury, the 7th holds Mars and Pluto, and the 9th holds Uranus and Neptune. Six of the ten planets sit in the 7th, 8th and 9th houses. Whole sign houses give the same picture: Venus and Pluto in the 7th, the Sun, Mercury and Mars in the 8th, Uranus and Neptune in the 9th, seven planets in all. Both systems put the weight in the same place: partnership, what is shared, and the bigger picture. The houses guide covers what each house stands for, and the calculator writes the area of life under each planet, such as "what you share, deep bonds and change" for the 8th house.

Mars shows how a house boundary works. Mars sits at 9°36′ Sagittarius, and under Placidus the 8th house begins at 10° Sagittarius. That leaves Mars in the 7th by 24 minutes of arc, while under whole sign houses it sits fully in the 8th. When a planet is within a degree or two of a house cusp, read it in both houses. The guide on why charts look different explains how house systems differ and how to choose one.

Aspects describe the relationship between two planets. Each one has an orb: how many degrees it sits away from exact. The smaller the orb, the stronger the aspect is read. The calculator lists conjunctions and oppositions up to 8 degrees, squares and trines up to 7, and sextiles up to 4. The glossary entries on the orb and the aspect explain both terms.

The calculator lists aspects by planet order, so you have to sort them yourself, from the smallest orb up. In the example chart the order is:

1. Jupiter trine Neptune, orb about 1.4 degrees.
2. Mercury conjunct Mars, orb about 1.5 degrees.
3. Jupiter trine Uranus, orb about 1.5 degrees.
4. Uranus conjunct Neptune, orb about 3 degrees.
5. Mercury square Jupiter, orb about 3 degrees.
6. Venus square Saturn, orb about 3.4 degrees.
7. Mars square Jupiter, orb about 4.5 degrees.
8. Sun square Jupiter, orb about 5.9 degrees.

Two things stand out here. First, the aspects between Uranus and Neptune show up for everyone born in those years, because the two planets traveled close together through Capricorn in the early 1990s. They describe a generation and say little about one person. The personal aspects are the Mercury and Mars conjunction (a mind that thinks fast and says what it thinks, astrologers say), Jupiter's squares to the Sun, Mercury and Mars, and the Venus and Saturn square. Second, Jupiter makes five aspects, which makes it the most vocal planet in the chart. Jupiter sits in Virgo in the 5th house and squares three planets in Sagittarius. Astrologers read this as an ongoing pull between the wish to expand and the need for detail and order. The calculator also writes a short reading under each aspect, and on your own chart you can use those lines for a first pass.

You need not give every aspect the same weight. Take the first three or four, and add the rest on top of that base.

If you mark the time as unknown, the calculator draws the chart for noon and says so above the result: the Sun and most planets are reliable, while the rising sign, the houses and the Moon degree need an exact time. In that case the Sun part of Step 1 still holds, and so do the Step 4 aspects between the slower planets. Steps 2 and 3 cannot be done without a time, and the calculator then hides the house line under each planet and the house cusps section. A birth certificate, a hospital record or the time a relative remembers is often a good enough start.

A horoscope in a magazine or on a website looks only at the Sun sign. For the person in our example that means "Sagittarius", and the same text goes to everyone born that day. Yet it is the birth time that makes this chart's rising sign Taurus, and the birth time and place that put the Moon in the last degree of Aquarius. Two people born on the same day in the same city, two hours apart, can share a Sun sign and have a very different Moon and rising sign.

This is where reading the chart begins. The Moon, the rising sign, the chart ruler and the aspects fill in what the Sun says alone, and sometimes correct it. The four steps above are enough to do this on your own.

A birth chart is a still picture of the moment you were born. The sky keeps moving, and each day's planets form new aspects to the points in your chart. These are called transits. The daily reading in a NovaOracles membership works with them: it sets the day's planets against your birth chart and tells you each morning which part of your chart is active today. Once you can read your chart, the daily reading is easier to follow, because a line like "Saturn is crossing your 10th house today" now makes sense to you.

Drawing your chart needs no account. The daily reading arrives every morning with a membership.

The usual mistakes are treating one placement as the whole chart, ignoring the orb, fixing a planet near a cusp in one house, reading generation aspects as personal, and reading the chart as a verdict.

• Treating one placement as the whole chart. The Sun is in Sagittarius, but the Moon, the rising sign and the chart ruler are there too. Seeing contradictions is normal.
• Ignoring the orb. A trine at 1.4 degrees and a square at 6 degrees do not carry the same weight.
• Fixing a planet near a cusp in one house. Within a degree or two of a cusp, try both house systems.
• Reading generation aspects as personal. Aspects between the outer planets stay the same for years.
• Reading the chart as a verdict. In the astrological tradition a chart shows tendencies, and what you do with them is up to you.

To try it with your own chart, open the birth chart calculator, go through the four steps in order and take notes. On the second read you will notice more.