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Finding Information on an
Astrological Chart
If you feel OK about
the concepts discussed here, but feel overwhelmed
and confused when looking at an actual astrological
chart, this page may help. There is a lot of
information crammed into a typical chart, and
without practice, it may not be clear where to find
things. I hope this little example will
help.
Here is my own birth chart,
as produced by AstroDienst (www.astro.com).
Charts produced by different software will look
somewhat different, but I think this example
will still help you find your way
around.
The pink scribbles are my
annotations, designed to call attention to where
some of the most important information can be
found.
The sign that each planet is
in can be found two ways.
On the chart wheel to the
right, you can see the glyphs for each planet just
inside the outer ring, which is labeled with the
glyphs for the signs. Note the Sun in Scorpio,
circled in pink on the far right. Sometimes, the
glyphs can be crowded together in such a way that
it is hard to be sure which sign they are in.
A chart will usually have a tick mark or dot
to show you the exact location of the planet. In
this chart, they are short blue lines, right inside
the wheel of the signs.
The other way to find the
sign of each planet is in the text listing to the
left. Notice Moon in Aquarius circled in pink. This
can be the easier place to get the information
about a particular planet, but it is harder to get
the big picture from this text listing than it is
from the graphical chart.
The houses are the pie-slice
segments of the chart circle. Notice the numbers 1
through 12 near the center of the chart. To find
which house a planet is in, find it in one of the
pie slices, and then read the house number for that
slice. The example shows the Moon and Jupiter in
the 9th house. (They are also in the sign of
Aquarius, as it happens.)
Aspects between the planets
can also be found in two places. Notice Jupiter and
the Moon in the graphical chart. They are in very
nearly the same spot (notice how the tick marks are
even closer together than the glyphs are.) They are
in conjunction. The triangular table on the lower
left shows the same information, in a different
format. If I look down the column for the Moon and
look across the row for Jupiter, I see a
conjunction symbol in the box where the row and
column meet.
The aspects are also shown
by the colored lines on the chart. One of the
aspects in this chart is a square between Venus and
the Moon, indicated by a red line. See if you can
find it in the chart and also in the triangular
table of aspects.
Finally, the ascendant or
rising sign is the sign where the 1st house begins,
at the left edge of the chart wheel. In this case,
Gemini is the rising sign. You can also see this in
red text, just above the text listing of planet
positions.
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