Personalized daily horoscope: today, for your chart

A newspaper horoscope starts from one fact: the sign the Sun was in when you were born. Twelve texts cover everyone, so each is written for millions of people at once. A personal horoscope starts from your whole birth chart: the Sun, the Moon and eight planets, each in its sign and house, and the Ascendant set by your birth time and place.

That changes what a daily reading can say. When Saturn squares your Mercury or the Moon crosses your fourth house, the effect is yours, not your sign's. Two people born a week apart share a Sun sign and can still have the sky touching completely different parts of their charts on the same day. None of this makes a personal horoscope a prediction. It is a way of reading the day against the chart you actually have, so the theme it names, such as a push to speak up or a need to slow down, can be tested against your own experience instead of taken on trust.

Each day the sky moves on. The Moon changes sign about every two to two and a half days, the faster planets make new aspects to your natal planets every few days, and the slow ones hold their contacts for months. The reading weighs these transits against your chart and picks the theme that stands out most for you today.

The day score sums today's contacts on a scale of 0 to 100, and the area scores split the same contacts into seven parts of life: love, work, social life, energy, communication, creativity and emotions. Above, you see the score for the whole day and its strongest area; members see all seven. A contact is strongest when it is exact and still counts for a few days on either side. The Moon's contacts change within hours, which is why the opening line can differ between morning and evening, while the contacts of Saturn or Pluto set a tone that lasts for weeks.

Your birth date fixes where the planets were; your birth time and place fix your Ascendant and your houses, which tie each part of the sky to an area of your life. The Ascendant moves through all twelve signs in a day, about one degree every four minutes, so even a rough time helps.

Without a time the chart is cast for noon. The planets' signs stay right in most cases, but houses are left out, and the reading talks about themes rather than places in your life. If you do not know your time, a birth certificate or a family member's memory is usually a good start. A birth time that is off by half an hour usually leaves your Ascendant in the same sign, though it can shift the degree and the house boundaries. If your time is uncertain, treat the house-based parts of the reading as softer than the sign-based ones.

Your birth date, time and place are turned into Universal Time with the historical time zone rules of that place. Our engine computes the apparent positions of the Sun, Moon and planets for your birth and for today, corrected for light time, aberration and nutation, and measures every contact between them. We test the engine against NASA JPL's Horizons ephemeris; the accuracy page shows the comparison.

Your chart is calculated in your browser. For today's opening line, your birth details are sent once to our server and not stored; no account is needed. For the full picture of today's contacts, the transit chart lists every one of them. The same birth data always gives the same chart, and the opening line is chosen from that day's real contacts. The wording of each theme is ours; the positions behind it come from the engine, not from a table or a random draw.