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Sky Tonight

The real moon phase, the real planetary positions, whether Mercury actually is retrograde — and what various traditions have made of each.

Where things actually are, right now, computed in your browser from your device's clock.

The Moon is shown with its real illuminated fraction, its phase, its distance from the Sun in degrees, its sign in both zodiacs, its nakshatra, and its tithi — the Hindu lunar day, of which there are thirty to a lunation rather than to a month, which is why a tithi can be skipped or repeated against the calendar on your wall.

The planets are shown in both zodiacs, and marked when they are retrograde.

And Mercury is either retrograde or it is not, which is stated plainly, because it is the most repeated astrological claim in popular culture and it is trivially checkable. Mercury is retrograde roughly three times a year for about three weeks — some eighteen per cent of the time, which is often enough that any given complaint has a fair chance of landing during one.

Retrograde motion is worth understanding rather than dismissing. A planet appears to reverse direction against the stars when the Earth overtakes it on the inside track, exactly as a slower car appears to slide backwards as you pass it. Nothing about the planet changes. Accounting for that apparent reversal was the central problem of ancient astronomy and the reason the Ptolemaic system needed epicycles at all; the heliocentric model did not solve the problem so much as dissolve it. The motion is real, the explanation is settled, and what it is held to signify is a separate question that this instrument does not answer.

The solar year is shown as the nearest of the eight stations of the Wheel of the Year, with how far off it is. Two of those stations are equinoxes and two are solstices — astronomical facts with dates. The four cross-quarters sit midway between them. The Wheel as a single eight-fold scheme is a mid-twentieth-century assembly, and some of the names attached to it are more recent than that.

What this does not do

It does not tell you what to do about any of it, and it makes no prediction. It reports the sky and then says what traditions have associated with that sky, attributed.

It also does not need your location. Positions in the zodiac are geocentric and are the same from anywhere on Earth; what changes with location is what is above the horizon, and that is the Birth Chart's business rather than this one's.

This shows you what the tradition says. It does not tell you what will happen.

The history and the evidence are in the Library: The zodiac.