Birth chart aspects calculator

Five angles do most of the work. A conjunction, zero degrees, fuses two planets so you cannot easily tell them apart. An opposition, a hundred and eighty, puts them face to face and usually plays out through other people. A square, ninety, is friction between things that will not be reconciled by wanting them to be. A trine, a hundred and twenty, is ease. A sextile, sixty, is ease that needs a nudge.

The hard ones are not the bad ones. A square describes something that keeps demanding work, and work is what produces anything worth having — most people's real competence sits on a square. A trine describes something that comes so easily it is often wasted. Read the hard aspects for where the life happens and the soft ones for what is available if you bother to use it.

How close the angle is to exact decides how loudly it speaks. Within a degree or two it is unmistakable and shows up in a first conversation; at seven or eight degrees it is background colour. The report lists the closest first, which is the right reading order and not the order most software uses.

Aspects also combine into shapes, and a shape says more than its parts. Two planets squaring a third that opposes one of them is a T-square, which behaves like a problem that will not stay solved. Three planets in trine make a grand trine, which is self-sufficient enough to become a rut. Several planets together in one sign or house make a stellium, and that part of the chart dominates whatever else is going on.

Finally, the same aspect reads differently depending on where it falls. Mars square Saturn between the third and sixth houses is an argument about work and routine; the same square between the seventh and tenth is one about partnership and standing. The signs and houses are in this report for that reason — an aspect read without them is a horoscope, not a chart.