Fixed stars calculator: the stars on your planets

The sky was read by its stars long before it was divided into signs, and the oldest layer of astrology is about individual stars rather than the zodiac laid over them. A planet of yours standing within about a degree of one of the great stars is held to take some of its character — and because there are only a few dozen stars bright or storied enough to count, most charts have two or three such contacts and some have none.

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Fixed Stars

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The sky was read by its stars long before it was divided into signs. A planet of yours within a degree of a great star takes on some of its colour.

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The stars themselves have reputations that are far older and far blunter than anything in modern astrology. Regulus for eminence and the fall that follows dishonour; Spica for gift and protection, the most fortunate of them; Algol for violence and for whatever a person cannot look away from; Aldebaran and Antares facing each other across the sky as integrity and excess. They are not gentle readings and were never meant to be.

Their degrees are not constant, which is what most star lists get wrong. Precession moves the stars against the tropical zodiac by about a degree every seventy-two years, so a table printed for 1950 is nearly a degree out for someone born in 2020. The positions here are calculated for your own birth date rather than taken from a fixed list, which is the difference between a real contact and a near miss.

Read them as colour rather than as structure. A star on the Sun, the Moon, the Ascendant or the Midheaven is worth taking seriously; a star on a minor point within a wide orb is not. And a star contact describes a quality that runs through a life, not an event that will happen on a date.

Contacts with the planets need no exact birth time — the planets move slowly and the stars barely at all. Contacts with the Ascendant and Midheaven do, and those are often the loudest ones, so an accurate time is worth having here even though the report says something useful without it.

Questions people ask

What are fixed stars in astrology?

The individual stars themselves, read directly rather than through the sign they happen to lie in. A planet within about a degree of one takes on its character.

Which stars matter most?

A few dozen at most. Regulus, Spica, Algol, Aldebaran, Antares, Sirius, Vega and the other bright or heavily storied ones — a contact with a faint star is not a contact worth reading.

Why do star positions differ between websites?

Because the stars move against the tropical zodiac by about a degree every seventy-two years, and many sites use an old fixed table. The positions here are worked out for your own birth date.

What orb should I use?

About a degree, and less for a faint star. Wide orbs turn the technique into a horoscope in which everybody has every star.