Transits Right Now: How to Read Them Against Your Chart

You read a transit by putting two lists side by side: the sky of today and the sky of your birth. This page explains the five things a transit is made of, says what NatalChart.AI calculates for each one, and works through examples from a published chart. It holds no live data. For the positions and speeds of the day, see today’s sky.

What a transit is made of

1. Today’s sky

The positions of the Sun, the Moon and the planets at this moment, written as longitudes along the zodiac from 0° to 360°. They are the same for everyone on Earth. NatalChart.AI calculates them with the Swiss Ephemeris in the tropical zodiac, for the same 17 bodies and points it uses in a natal chart.

2. Your natal chart

The same kind of list, frozen at the moment of your birth. Natal positions never move. They are the fixed marks that the moving sky passes over. The birth date settles the natal planets, with one exception: the Moon moves about 13° in a day, more than any transit orb, so without a birth time the transits to your natal Moon cannot be trusted.

Which natal house a transiting body is passing through depends on the exact birth time. Without it the Ascendant, the Midheaven and the houses are undetermined, and the transits to your natal planets can still be read.

3. The difference in longitude

Subtract one longitude from the other and take the shorter way round the circle. That gives an angle between 0° and 180°. If the angle is close to 0°, 60°, 90°, 120° or 180°, the two are in aspect: conjunction, sextile, square, trine or opposition, in that order. NatalChart.AI uses these five major aspects only.

4. The orb

The orb is how far the measured angle is from the exact one. A transit is listed only while its orb is inside the limit, and the limit depends on the body that is moving.

These limits are much tighter than the natal orbs of 8° (6° for the sextile), because a transit is meant to describe what is happening now and not what will be exact next month. See how orbs work.

5. The speed of the transiting body

How long a transit lasts depends on how fast the body moves. The table takes the daily motion of the ten planets on the demonstration date and shows how long each would need to cross its whole transit orb, from one edge to the other, at that speed.

Demonstration birth: 1991-09-06 at 18:30 local time, Kyiv, Ukraine (50.4501° N, 30.5234° E), Europe/Kyiv at UTC+3, so 1991-09-06 15:30 UTC. Tropical zodiac, Placidus houses, Swiss Ephemeris 2.10.03. Full result and settings on How to verify your birth chart.

On that date the Moon covered 14.60° a day and Neptune 0.0104°, so the first crossed its orb in about 7 hours and the second would need about 19 months. Read the slow transits as the chapters and the fast ones as the days inside them.

The speed of one day is only a first estimate. Planets slow down, stand still and turn retrograde, and a body near such a turn barely moves, which is why some rows above are so long. A slow planet can also cross the same natal degree three times: forward, backward and forward again.

What the site calculates for each transit

• The orb, in degrees, from the two longitudes.
• The phase. Applying while the orb is closing, separating once it is opening. It follows from the position and the speed of the transiting body at that moment, retrograde motion included. Within one arcminute of the exact angle the transit is simply called exact.
• The exact date. The reading says “becomes exact on” and the date when the transit is applying, and “was exact on” and the date when it is separating. The date is found by searching the ephemeris for the moment the orb reaches zero, forward or backward from today. It is not estimated from the speed of the day.

For the Moon no date is named, because it crosses an aspect within hours. If a planet turns before it reaches the exact angle, no date is given, because there is none to give. These values appear in the text of the reading, in the export and in the API, so the same transit carries the same numbers wherever you meet it.

A worked example

The natal side is the demonstration chart. The transiting side is a published response of the API for that chart on 18 September 2026, calculated for 12:00 UTC. It is a fixed example of one day and not the sky of today.

One transit measured by hand

At 11.89° a day, an orb of 0.27° is about 33 minutes away from exact, and the whole orb of 2° on either side is crossed in about 8 hours. That is why a Moon transit is given with its phase and without a date.

Transits as the site calculated them

Demonstration birth: 1991-09-06 at 18:30 local time, Kyiv, Ukraine (50.4501° N, 30.5234° E), Europe/Kyiv at UTC+3, so 1991-09-06 15:30 UTC. Tropical zodiac, Placidus houses, Swiss Ephemeris 2.10.03. Full result and settings on How to verify your birth chart.

The rows come from the response published on the developers page, where the lists are cut short, so this is a sample of that day and not the full list. Jupiter conjunction natal Moon is applying with an orb of 1.77°, and the reading would say that it becomes exact on 27 September 2026. Pluto trine natal Mars is separating at 0.22°: it was exact on 3 September 2026, and the theme is easing. Uranus trine natal Lilith (osculating apogee) is separating at 0.14° and carries no date, because the search found no exact moment for it.

How to read a transit once you have the numbers

• The transiting body is the theme. Saturn brings limits and duty, Jupiter growth, Mars effort and friction. The last column of the speed table gives a cue for each.
• The natal placement is the part of you that is addressed. A transit to your Moon speaks to needs and moods, one to your Mercury to thinking and talk.
• The aspect is the manner. A conjunction intensifies, a trine or a sextile supports, a square or an opposition challenges.
• The phase is the timing. Applying means the theme is building toward the exact date. Separating means it is easing.
• Slow before fast, tight before wide. A transit from Saturn, Uranus, Neptune or Pluto lasts for months and frames a period. A transit from the Sun, Mercury, Venus or Mars colours some days, and one from the Moon some hours.

What a transit does not do

A transit does not cause events and does not decide them. Astrology is a symbolic language, and its claims have not been confirmed as forecasts. What a transit gives you is a dated question: this part of my chart is being touched now, in this manner, until about then. What do I notice? Use it to reflect and to decide where to put your attention, not to settle questions of health, money or the law.

See the transits to your own chart

Enter your birth date, the most reliable time you have and your birthplace. The chart is calculated first. The transit reading is written afterwards from the calculated contacts, and each statement names the transiting body, the natal placement, the aspect and the orb it rests on.

• Today’s sky: where each body stands today and how fast it moves, the same for everyone.
• Transits to your natal chart: what the transit reading contains.
• Weekly horoscope: a seven-day digest built from the transits to your own chart.
• Aspect orbs explained: the natal, synastry and transit limits side by side.

Questions

Next: Today’s sky · Transits to your chart · Aspect orbs · Weekly horoscope · Birth chart calculator · All calculators