Ephemeris: daily planet positions for any month

An ephemeris is a table of where the Sun, the Moon and the planets stand, day by day. Astronomers have printed them for centuries to point telescopes and to steer ships; astrologers use the same tables to cast birth charts, to time transits and to see which planet is retrograde.

A printed astrological ephemeris usually gives one row per day at midnight or noon, with each body's position in the zodiac by sign, degree and minute. This page does the same, computed fresh for the month you pick, from 1900 to 2099.

Each row is a day and each column is a body: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the true lunar node and mean Lilith. A cell such as 16° Scorpio 39′ means the body stands 16 degrees and 39 minutes into Scorpio. One sign spans 30 degrees, and one degree holds 60 minutes of arc.

For example, on November 1, 2026, at 00:00 UT the Sun stands at 8°34′ Scorpio, the Moon at 27°28′ Cancer, Mercury at 16°39′ Scorpio with an R, and Venus at 26°14′ Libra with an R. Both Mercury and Venus are retrograde that day, and the rows that follow show Mercury turning direct on November 13 and Venus the next day.

The glyph turns gold on the first day a body is seen in a new sign, so sign changes stand out as you read down a column. The exact moment of each change is listed below the table.

Universal Time (UT) is the time at the Greenwich meridian, and most ephemerides are printed for 00:00 UT so that one table serves the whole world. To find a position for your own clock, work out how far your time zone is from UT on that date, summer time included.

In Berlin in winter the clock runs one hour ahead of UT, so the row for 00:00 UT is 1:00 a.m. there. In New York in winter the clock runs five hours behind, so the same row is 7:00 p.m. the day before. The Moon moves about half a degree an hour, so for the Moon the hour matters; for Saturn or Pluto it hardly does.

An R next to a position means the planet is retrograde that day: seen from Earth, it is moving backward through the zodiac. In space the planet keeps moving forward around the Sun; Earth overtakes it, or it overtakes Earth, and for a few weeks its position against the stars slides back before it turns forward again.

The days on which the motion turns are called stations, and the list below the table gives each one with its time. The Sun and the Moon are never retrograde. Mercury turns retrograde about three times a year, sometimes four. Venus does so every 19 months and Mars about every 26 months, while Jupiter to Pluto spend four to five months of each year retrograde. For a year at a glance, the retrograde calendar shows every loop on one page.

The lunar nodes are the two points where the Moon's path crosses the ecliptic, the Sun's yearly path. The table gives the north node in its true position, the one astrologers read in the North Node calculator. It moves backward on average, about three minutes of arc a day, but it wobbles: some days it stands still or edges forward, so the R mark comes and goes.

Black Moon Lilith is the far point of the Moon's orbit, its apogee. The table gives mean Lilith, the smooth average point most ephemerides print, which moves steadily forward and goes around the zodiac in almost nine years. The Black Moon Lilith calculator also shows the true, osculating point.

Below the table you'll find the events of the month in time order: the new Moon, the first quarter, the full Moon and the last quarter, each with the sign the Moon stands in; the moment a planet from the Sun to Pluto enters a new sign; and every station, when a planet turns retrograde or direct. A new or full Moon close enough to a lunar node is marked as an eclipse.

The Moon's own sign changes are left out of the list, as it enters a new sign every two or three days; its column shows each change. The lunar calendar gives the phases day by day.

Positions come from the same engine as the birth chart: VSOP87 for the Sun and the planets, the Meeus series for the Moon, Pluto and the nodes, with light time, aberration and nutation applied, so every longitude is apparent and geocentric, measured from the true equinox of the date. Retrograde is read from each body's motion over the day around midnight.

We compare the engine with the Swiss Ephemeris on sample dates: the Sun to Pluto agree within 10 arcseconds, mean Lilith within a few arcseconds and the true node within an arcminute. The table truncates every position to the whole minute and never rounds it up, so a planet shown at 29°59′ has not yet changed sign. Everything runs in your browser, and the CSV is built there too.

Astrology reads these positions as a tradition of symbols. The ephemeris itself is plain astronomy: where each body stands, day by day.