Chiron calculator: what is my Chiron sign?

Chiron is a small icy body, about two hundred kilometers across, that Charles Kowal found at Palomar Observatory in November 1977. Its orbit crosses Saturn's and reaches almost to Uranus, and one lap around the Sun takes about fifty years. Astronomers class it as a centaur, a group of bodies between the giant planets that are part asteroid and part comet; Chiron itself has shown a faint coma.

Astrologers named its meaning after the centaur of Greek myth, a healer and teacher who could not heal his own wound. In a birth chart Chiron marks the place where you were hurt early and where, with time, you become unusually able to help others with the same hurt.

Chiron's orbit is strongly elongated. Near the Sun, in the part of the sky that holds Virgo and Libra, it moves fast; far from the Sun, around Pisces and Aries, it crawls. Our ephemeris shows Chiron spending up to about eight years in Aries and about seven in Pisces, but only around two years in Libra. That is why whole generations share a Chiron sign in some decades while in others it changes every couple of years.

Seen from Earth, Chiron is also retrograde for about five months every year, close to four days in ten. The calculator shows whether it was retrograde at your birth, and the date it entered and left your sign. When a retrograde loop takes it back across a boundary, those dates tell you which pass you were born in.

Because the sign is shared by everyone born over several years, the house carries the personal part of Chiron. With a birth time and place the calculator gives Chiron's house in the Placidus system: Chiron in the second is often read through money and self worth, in the seventh through close partners, in the tenth through career and public standing.

Aspects matter too. Chiron touching your Sun, Moon or Ascendant brings its theme into the core of the chart. The birth chart calculator draws your full wheel, and the Chiron sign readings on this page give a first line for each sign.

A retrograde Chiron at birth is common, roughly four people in ten have one, and astrologers read it as healing that works inward first, often slowly and privately. The retrograde entry in our glossary explains why every body beyond Earth appears to move backward for part of the year.

Around the age of fifty Chiron comes back to the place it held at your birth, the Chiron return. Because its speed varies so much, the return does not fall at exactly the same age for everyone, but it is read as a time to make peace with the old wound and pass on what it taught you.

Chiron's orbit is disturbed by Saturn and Uranus, so a simple orbit formula drifts. We use NASA JPL's Horizons ephemeris for 2060 Chiron, a numerical integration fitted to observations since 1895, sampled every eighty days from 1899 to 2100 and interpolated between samples. From that heliocentric position the engine adds Earth's position, light time, aberration and nutation, the same steps it applies to the planets.

Our checks compare the result with Horizons' own apparent positions and with the Swiss Ephemeris; both agree to within one arcsecond. The table ends in 2100, which is why this calculator accepts birth years from 1900 to 2099. As always, the calculation runs in your browser and your birth data stays with you.