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 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 drew its meaning from 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, on 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 by default (whole sign, Koch and equal houses are on the switch): 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 one-line reading for each sign.

Traditionally, the house shows the area of life where the old hurt tends to sit and where a gift for healing later grows. Astrologers read Chiron in the first house as a sore spot around identity and appearance, in the second around earning and self-worth, and in the third around speaking, learning or siblings. In the fourth it touches home and family roots, in the fifth creativity, play and being seen, and in the sixth health and daily work.

From the seventh house on, the theme turns outward: one-to-one relationships in the seventh; trust, intimacy and shared resources in the eighth; belief, study and travel in the ninth; and work and reputation in the tenth. In the eleventh it concerns friends and groups, and in the twelfth solitude and what stays hidden. Each placement is read in both directions, with the area that hurts also seen as the place where you can later help others. The house needs a birth time; without one the calculator gives the sign only.

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 a planet 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. Astrologers read it as a time to make peace with the old wound and pass on what it taught you. The planetary return calculator gives the dates of your own Chiron return, retrograde passes included.

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.

In our checks, the result agrees with Horizons' own apparent positions and with the Swiss Ephemeris to within one arcsecond. The table ends in 2100, which is why this calculator accepts birth years from 1900 to 2099. The calculation runs in your browser.

Your birth date and birthplace give the sign; the birth time adds the house, where most of the personal reading lives. To show the first line of today's reading, your birth details are sent once to our server, which does not store them; the place search sends only the place name you type. The birth chart calculator shows Chiron beside every planet.

The North Node calculator finds the lunar nodes, which also move slowly through the signs, and the retrograde planets tool shows when planets turn back. Lilith, which people often look up beside Chiron, has its own Black Moon Lilith calculator. Chiron here follows NASA JPL's orbit in the tropical zodiac; why charts differ explains the choices behind any position, from the ephemeris to the zodiac.