Contents
Astrology Fundamentals
How to Understand Horoscopes
How to Calculate Your Horoscope
Signs of the Zodiac
The Planets
The Houses
The Aspects
Astrology and Compatibility
Astrology for Everyday Decisions
Astrology and Destiny
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How to Calculate Your Horoscope
Most horoscopes published in newspapers and magazines are based only on the placement of the Sun at your birth. A complete horoscope for an individual, known as a birth chart, takes into account all the planets (including the Sun and the Moon) and offers much more comprehensive insight into your life and personality. Once you’ve calculated a horoscope based on the date, time, and location of your birth, you can interpret it by analyzing the relationships it shows among signs, planets, houses, aspects, and cusps.
Calculating Your Horoscope by Computer
Using astrology software is the easiest and most reliable way to calculate your horoscope. All you need is the day, year, exact time, and location of the event or birth of the person you’d like to examine. To make it easier to compile this information, most astrology software programs include built-in atlases with latitude, longitude, and time zone data. Most astrology software packages cost anywhere from $99–400.
Computer-based horoscope calculation services are also widely available on the internet, though none of the free web-based services offers the full suite of features found in software packages. To calculate your birth chart (your horoscope at the moment of your birth) for free
online, visit www.astro.com.
Calculating Your Horoscope by Hand
Hand calculation of horoscopes has fallen out of favor because it’s time-consuming and susceptible to errors. Even so, it’s the one way to calculate horoscopes beyond your birth chart without the use of expensive software or a paid astrologer. Detailed instructions for calculating a chart by hand are included in most astrological atlases—books that list the latitude, longitude, and time zones of locations around the globe. Calculating a chart by hand requires the day, year, exact time and location of the event, as well as the following additional resources:
- Astrological atlas: Used to determine the precise location of an event or birth of a person
- Table of houses: Used to identify where the boundaries of each house should be drawn on a horoscope for a given day, time, and location
- Ephemeris: Used to determine the position of the planets on a specific day
Using an Ephemeris
An ephemeris (plural ephemerides) is a collection of lists specifying the location of the planets at noon and midnight of every day of a given year from the vantage point of the prime meridian—the line through Greenwich, England, that has a longitude of zero degrees and separates the Earth’s eastern and western hemispheres. The data in an ephemeris is used to get an approximate sense of the planets’ locations. To use it, you examine the planetary data for a specific day, then estimate the location of the planets for the horoscope you’re calculating based on:
- The time zone in which the event or birth is located
- The time relative to the time in Greenwich, England, at which the event or birth occurs
For example, to use an ephemeris to obtain the approximate locations of the planets at
7:30 a.m. in New York City on March 1, 2006, follow these steps:
- Turn to the page in your ephemeris for March 1, 2006, and use the table for noon.
- Since New York is five hours behind Greenwich, the table’s data for noon (in Greenwich) will show the location of the planets at 7:00 a.m. in New York.
- Note the location of each planet within its sign, as shown in the example below.
- Since your ephemeris will be 30 minutes off (giving you data for 7:00 a.m. rather than 7:30 a.m.), you’ll get only an approximation of the planets’ locations. However, the actual locations will differ only slightly.
You can buy an ephemeris for the current year in print or download one for free from astrology websites such as www.ephemeris.com. Most ephemerides include many years of coverage, both past and future. Some cover every year from now through 2100.
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