Frequently asked questions

A birth chart shows the state of the heavens at the time and place of birth. However, the planets move on, entering into new relationships with the planetary positions in the birth chart all the time. The passages of the planets over birth positions are called transits.
Interpreting transits is one of the ancient astrological forecasting methods that can tell you which of your life's themes are likely to become particularly important at a given time.
For example, transits of fast-moving planets often tell of opportunities, health, moods and states of mind that pass fairly quickly. The slower transits describe cycles of development that take much longer, learning phases, crises, as well as periods of stability and happiness.

On most days, more than one planet is passing over, or transiting, the planetary positions in your birth chart. Astrodienst chooses the most important transit on a particular day for you to read about.
Some long-term influences can last for months. They can be the most important things happening to you on an astrological level, but in order to avoid repeating the same interpretation every day for months on end, we give you the description of the other influences as well. If you move further down the Daily Horoscope page, you will find links to "Other transits occurring today" and "Important long-term influences".

The short-term influences are complete for every day. If a transit has not made it into the "long-term" list, it will only appear on the day the transit is exact.
This list is a selection of seven to eight long-term themes, but of course there may be more. The computer picks the most relevant ones, and at the same time creates some variation.
If you order the "Transits of the Year", you can see all the information for a whole year in one complete overview. Or, for a similar purpose, you can subscribe to the "Extended Daily Horoscope".
Alternatively, use the printable "Transit Calendar" in the Extended Chart Selection -> Special charts. It contains all important transits over a four year period. If you use it with a book like Robert Hand's "Planets in Transit", you can get all the information you want.

The Moon is the fastest moving planetary body used for the transits. Therefore it makes the most aspects to your natal planets. Other planets such as Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc move more slowly and therefore, it takes longer for them to get to a position where they aspect a natal planet.
The order of speed, from fast to slow, is: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
The slower the planet, the longer the influence.

We are tipping the scales in the Personal Daily Horoscope, to weigh and select what is most likely relevant. But we cannot simply look for 'the most relevant' transit each day. This would result in the appearance of the same transit reading for a long time, which most people would find boring and silly. Therefore, for each daily horoscope requested on our website, we always compute transits for the whole year for this chart, find the optimal distribution for 365 day-slots and then display the particular day-slot of the requested day.
Because we always compute transits for the complete calendar year, a discontinuity in the list of selected transits can occur when the year changes, between 31 December and 1 January.

Lunar transits, i.e. transits by the moving Moon, have the lowest priority in the selection. The Moon makes its circle through your birth chart in 27 days and repeats all transits with this frequency - while squares, sextiles and trines happen twice within each circle. This makes Moon transits the most frequent and the least interesting events, and they are only used in the Daily Horoscope if nothing better can be found for a given day. How often we have to fall back on a Moon transit for a given chart depends on the overall distribution of the other planets in the chart. They may be "nicely" distributed in such a way, that their transits fill most of the 365 day-slots we have in a given year for the Daily Horoscope. Then you will find few Moon transits. If the other planets are distributed in a way that they often compete for space in the same day slots, while there remain many day-slots to which none of the more important planetary transits can be attributed, then the program has to fall back on Moon transits more often. On average, about 60 out of 365 day slots are filled with Moon transits.

If for a given day there are several transits competing for the top place in the day slot, the weight evaluation is rather complex. The natal planet is evaluated according to its role in the chart, the nature of the aspect is considered, and slower transiting planets have much more weight than faster ones. But another factor is taken into account: slower transits have a longer duration, and it does not really matter whether you find their reading a few days earlier or later in the Daily Horoscope - they have a long term effect anyway. Therefore, their reading is often shifted to a day when there is nothing else of relevance on that day. Faster transits with a short period of relevance cannot be shifted to another day, so they either get assigned to the current day slot or to none at all. This mechanism often lets a faster transit win for a particular day-slot, because the reading of the slower transit is presented on another day within its period of relevance.