Ingress

Each sign holds thirty degrees of the zodiac, so a sign boundary sits at every multiple of thirty degrees of ecliptic longitude. A planet ingresses the instant it passes one of those marks. The Sun's four crossings into the cardinal signs are the turning points of the year: entering Aries at the spring equinox, Cancer at the summer solstice, Libra at the autumn equinox, and Capricorn at the winter solstice. Fast planets ingress often, while the outer planets cross a boundary only rarely, since they can spend years in a single sign.

Tradition reads an ingress as a change of scene. The Sun's ingresses open the astrological seasons, and each one is sometimes charted in its own right to read the mood of the weeks ahead. When a slow planet ingresses, the effect is larger and longer, taken as a shift in the collective climate that colors everyone's chart for years rather than weeks. Some astrologers also cast a fresh chart for the exact instant of a solar ingress and read it as a forecast for the season it opens, a practice that belongs to what is called mundane astrology.

In 2026 the Sun entered Libra on 23 September (UTC), the autumn equinox, and Libra season began. That same year Jupiter made a bigger ingress, moving out of Cancer and into Leo, which tradition reads as the year's theme of growth changing its address from home and family toward creativity and play.

An ingress is not the same as a transit in general; it is the specific act of crossing a sign line, while a transit is any current position or aspect. The boundary itself is the cusp, and the ingress is the crossing of it. Because the calendar year and the Sun's cycle do not match exactly, its ingress dates slide by a day from one year to the next.

The NovaOracles zodiac sign dates tool shows when the Sun enters each sign, the zodiac entry lays out the twelve in order, and the transits guide covers what a slow planet's ingress can bring.