Astrology Transits Explained: Reading Your Year Ahead

Spend any time around astrology and you will hear transits blamed for almost everything: a rough month at work, a sudden move, a relationship that finally settled or finally ended. It might look like a handy excuse, but the idea underneath is straightforward, and once you see how it works you can read your own year with a bit more perspective.

What a transit actually is

Your birth chart is a snapshot. It shows where the Sun, Moon and planets were at the moment you were born, and it never changes. The sky, of course, keeps moving. A transit is what happens when a planet in its current position lines up at a meaningful angle with something in that fixed snapshot.

Say you were born with Venus at 14 degrees of Taurus. Every time a planet passes over 14 degrees of Taurus, or sits at a particular angle to it, astrologers would call that a transit to your Venus. Saturn crossing that spot is a Saturn transit to your Venus. Mars crossing the same point is a much briefer affair.

Astrologers allow a little leeway, often a couple of degrees either side, so a transit builds up, peaks and fades rather than switching on and off. With the slower planets, that can stretch the whole thing over weeks or months. In practice, nobody works this out by hand any more. Astrologers use an ephemeris or software that compares the current sky against your chart and lists the dates.

Why this is not the same as a Sun sign horoscope

A magazine or website horoscope uses one piece of information: the sign your Sun was in when you were born. That sorts everyone alive into twelve groups. It can be entertaining, and a good writer can make it feel apt, but it is working with very little.

Transits are calculated against your chart, which means your degrees. Two people born a week apart in the same city share a Sun sign, but their Moons may be in different signs entirely and their rising degrees will not match. A transit landing right on one person's Moon can miss the other's for years. That is also why a daily horoscope so often fails to describe your day: it cannot know that Saturn is sitting on your Moon this month, because it does not know where your Moon is.

One practical note if you want to look at transits to your rising sign. You need a reasonably accurate birth time for that, and in the UK the time is not always printed on a birth certificate. It may be in hospital notes or written in a baby book instead, and recording practice varies by country and even by hospital.

Transit Calculator: Your Year Ahead

See the major planetary transits to your birth chart over the next 12 months, with exact dates, and a reading of what each period may bring.

Try our Transit Calculator: Your Year Ahead free, here on this site →

Fast movers and slow movers

Not all transits carry the same weight, and the difference comes down to speed.

The Moon goes round the whole zodiac in about 27 days, touching every point in your chart and staying only a few hours on each. The Sun, Mercury and Venus take roughly a year to get round, Mars close to two. These are quick visitors, traditionally read as mood, timing and small pushes: the tone of a week, a conversation that surfaces, a burst of energy or irritation. Handy for fine detail. Nobody sensibly explains a change of career with a two day Mercury transit.

The bigger chapters are said to belong to the slow planets, and each has its own reputation:

• Jupiter circles the zodiac in about twelve years, roughly a year per sign, and is usually read as openings and more room to move.
• Saturn takes around twenty nine and a half years, about two and a half years per sign, and is associated with effort, responsibility and taking stock.
• Uranus takes about eighty four years, close to seven years per sign, and gets linked to disruption and sudden changes of direction.
• Neptune takes around one hundred and sixty five years, about fourteen years per sign, and is read as a blurring of boundaries, for better or worse.
• Pluto takes roughly two hundred and forty eight years, and because its orbit is more stretched it can spend anywhere from around twelve to over twenty years in one sign. It carries the reputation for endings that clear space.

Because these planets crawl, one contact with a point in your chart can be active on and off for a year or more. Astrologers treat them as the background of a period rather than the weather of a week.

There is a quirk worth knowing about here. Planets sometimes appear to move backwards against the stars, which is called retrograde motion. Nothing actually moves backwards; it is an optical illusion caused by the relative motion of Earth and the planet in question. The practical effect is that a slow planet can cross the same degree of your chart three separate times: once going forward, once travelling back over it while retrograde, and once more when it resumes forward motion. Saturn is retrograde for around four and a half months of each year and Jupiter for about four, so this is common rather than rare.

Astrologers read the three passes as one story in three parts. The first contact raises the subject, often abruptly. The middle one covers the same ground again: second thoughts, unfinished business. The third is where it settles into something you can live with. Whether or not you buy the interpretation, it is a fair description of why a situation often refuses to resolve on the first attempt.

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The angles, in plain English

Astrology uses a handful of main angles, called aspects. Stripped of jargon, they are these:

• Conjunction: the transiting planet sits on the same degree as your birth planet. Traditionally the strongest contact, read as that planet's themes coming right to the front of your life.
• Opposition: directly across the chart, 180 degrees away. Usually read as something arriving from outside, often through other people, where a balance has to be struck.
• Square: a quarter of the circle, 90 degrees. Read as friction or pressure, the kind that forces a decision instead of letting things drift.
• Trine: a third of the circle, 120 degrees. Traditionally the easiest contact, read as things flowing without much effort, though easy transits can also pass unnoticed.
• Sextile: 60 degrees. Similar to a trine but milder, often described as an opportunity you have to act on.

Those five will get you through a year of chart reading. Finer angles exist, and they add shading, but you can leave them until you want the detail.

The ones people notice, and how to use them

The transits people ask about most tend to involve slow planets touching the most personal parts of a chart: the Sun, the Moon and the ascendant, or rising sign.

Saturn contacts to those points have a long-standing reputation for seriousness. They are read as stretches of effort and stock-taking, where anything that was never quite solid starts to show it. Pluto transits to the same points are read as slower and deeper, more about something ending so that something else can take shape, and they can run for years. Jupiter is read as the opposite mood, though you usually have to walk through the door yourself.

If you want actual dates rather than a general sense of things, the free Transit Calculator on this site lists the exact dates of the major transits to your own chart for the next twelve months.

Used sensibly, all of this is a planning and reflection tool. Knowing a long Saturn contact runs through next autumn might push you to leave more time for a project and less for everything else. A Jupiter transit on the way might be the nudge to have the conversation you keep postponing. Looking backwards works too: match past transits against things that actually happened and you will find out fairly quickly how much weight you want to give them.

What does not work is treating a transit as a verdict. A difficult angle cannot tell you what you will decide, who you will ask for help, or how prepared you are. Plenty of people go through the same transits and end up somewhere completely different. Read them as context rather than instructions and they become far more interesting.

The Next Step

Now that you have read through the advice above, you might want to put it into practice. Our Transit Calculator: Your Year Ahead lets you see the major planetary transits to your birth chart over the next 12 months, with exact dates, and a reading of what each period may bring. Try it now →