Every dispatch board I ever ran had two columns: where a crew was supposed to be, and where it actually was. Most daily astrology skips that second column entirely. A transit only means something once you write today's planetary degree next to the matching degree on your own chart and measure the gap between them. No gap within range, no event, whatever a column somewhere is saying about your sign this week. Here is the full mechanical version of what I do before 7 a.m., including the part where I am wrong.
The two columns you need: your degrees and today's
Column one is fixed: it is your natal chart, the planets at the degree and sign they held the moment you were born. Pull your printout or your app's wheel and write down the degree for your Sun, Moon, rising sign, and whichever other planet sits close to an angle. I keep mine on an index card: Moon at 14 Scorpio, Venus at 2 Sagittarius, Ascendant at 19 Leo, and so on down the ten bodies. That card does not change. It is the schedule.
Column two changes every day: where the planets actually are right now, in degrees and minutes, not just the sign. This is the piece a Sun Sign Column or a Reading Built From Your Birth Date was never built to give you, because a column has to fit everyone born under the same sign and a reading like that is sold as a finished product rather than a method you run yourself. Once you have both columns written down, the rest of this is subtraction.
Finding the day's positions without buying software
You do not need a program to get today's degrees, just a reliable ephemeris, which is simply a table of planetary positions by date. I run the same four steps most mornings:
- Open a free online ephemeris for the current date and note the degree and sign listed for each planet, especially the Moon, since it moves roughly one degree an hour and is the one body worth checking daily.
- Write those degrees in a second column next to your natal list from the step above, planet matched to planet.
- Subtract the smaller degree from the larger one within each sign, or add the distance across signs if the two planets are in different signs, to get the separation in degrees.
- Flag any pair under 8 degrees apart for the slower planets, or under 1 degree for the Moon, and set the rest aside for the day.
That fourth step is where most people either stop too early or keep going when they should stop. The separation number is the whole point. Everything after it is interpretation, and interpretation only applies to pairs that are actually close.
Which contacts count: orbs, applying and separating
The separation you just calculated is the orb, and how wide an orb counts as a real contact depends on which planet is moving. A fast body like the Moon or Mercury needs a tight orb because it will be gone again within a day; a slow body like Saturn or Pluto can sit close to your degree for weeks, so a slightly wider orb still produces something you can feel.
| Transiting planet | Orb I use for a personal planet or angle | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Moon | 1 degree | Gone in hours; a wide orb catches nothing specific |
| Mercury, Venus, Sun | 3 degrees | Moves fast enough that a tight orb still spans the whole event |
| Mars | 4 degrees | Slower, effect spreads across a day or two |
| Jupiter, Saturn | 6 degrees | Sits near a degree for weeks, so the window opens earlier |
| Uranus, Neptune, Pluto | 8 degrees | Years-long cycle; the orb marks when it starts to register, not a single day |
The direction of the gap matters as much as its size. Applying means the moving planet has not reached your degree yet and is closing in, which in my log tends to build across the hours before it peaks. Separating means it has already passed and the distance is growing, which usually reads as a comedown rather than an onset. I say "tends to" and "usually" on purpose: this is pattern from my own notes and the sessions I run on Thursdays, not a rule that holds every time.
Working one real morning through, Moon first
Take an actual morning from my log. Natal Venus at 2 Sagittarius. The ephemeris for that date had the Moon at 1 Sagittarius 40, applying. That is a separation of about 20 minutes of arc, well inside the 1 degree orb, and closing. The standard reference for what a transit even is, if you want it stated plainly rather than through my clipboard shorthand, is this definition of a transit, and it is worth reading once so you know I am not inventing the term.
Nothing else that morning was close. Transiting Mars sat 11 degrees from my natal Mars, outside even the widest orb on the table above, so I set it aside without a second look. The Moon contact was the only live one, and it matched: a morning that felt unusually warm and talkative, which is roughly what a close Venus-Moon contact tends to produce in my log, nothing more dramatic than that. The point of walking through the whole morning is to show how much of the sky is simply not in range on any given day. One contact was close. Everything else was noise I did not need to read.
The mistakes that make a transit look bigger than it is
The same handful of errors shows up in nearly every session where someone brings me a transit that felt huge and turned out to be nothing measurable. Run this list before you trust a reading:
- Used the sign instead of the degree, so two planets eight signs apart looked "close" because they shared a word like "Scorpio"
- Checked the transiting planet's sign against your Sun sign only, and skipped the Moon, rising sign, and the rest of the chart entirely
- Used an orb wide enough for Pluto on a fast-moving planet like Mercury, which makes almost every day look busy
- Forgot to check whether the contact was applying or separating, and read a fading influence as a fresh one
- Pulled positions from a source dated for a different time zone, which can shift the Moon's degree enough to move it in or out of orb
That last one catches people more than they expect, since the Moon changes degree roughly every two hours and a few hours of time zone drift is enough to turn an applying contact into a separating one. Write down the exact date and clock time you pulled the ephemeris for, the same way I write down which shift board I am reading. The method does not get more interesting than two columns, a subtraction, and an honest look at the orb table. It gets more useful the longer you keep the card.