Do I need my time of birth?
Not for a chart. The date alone places the Sun and every planet. Adding the time and the town turns the wheel to your rising sign, puts the Moon exactly and adds the twelve houses. The map is different: it needs the time and the town, because its lines move a degree every four minutes.
How are the positions worked out?
From the same astronomy an observatory would use, for the moment and place you give: the tropical zodiac, Placidus houses and the Moon’s mean node. It is your sky, not a template.
What happens to the birth details?
They stay in your browser, on your device. Looking up a town sends only the town’s name to a place search. If you buy a printed poster, the finished picture is uploaded so the printer can print it, and it is deleted after 30 days.
Can I print it myself?
Yes. Download the file for £4.99 and take it to any print shop. It is a 300 dpi JPEG at the exact paper size; ask for it on matt paper.
Who is the two-chart poster for?
Any two people: a couple, two friends, two of your children, you and your child. The first person’s planets sit inside the wheel and the second’s outside it, and the caption says which is which.
What do the lines on the two-chart poster mean?
Each line joins a planet in one chart to a planet in the other where they stand at one of the classic angles. Solid lines are the easy ones — together, a third or a sixth of the circle apart. Dashed lines are the tense ones — opposite or a quarter apart.
What do the lines on the map mean?
Each one marks the places where a planet was doing something exact at the moment you were born. On the straight solid lines it was at its highest in the sky; on the straight dashed lines it was directly underfoot. On the curved solid lines it was rising, and on the curved dashed ones it was setting.
Why does the map start with the Sun alone?
Four lines on an otherwise empty world is the quiet version, and the one most people hang. Switch on all the planets and you get forty.
What does the night-sky poster show?
Every star you could have seen without a telescope from that town at that moment, inside one circle: the horizon runs round the edge and the point straight overhead is the middle. The constellations are joined in thin lines, and the Moon is drawn at the phase it was in.
Does the night have to be a birthday?
No. Any date from 1800 to 2100 works: a wedding, the night you met, the night a child was born. If you have already entered a date of birth for a chart, the night-sky poster starts from it and you can change it.
Why is east on the left of the night sky?
Because it is a map of what is above you, not below. Hold it over your head with the N pointing north and east falls on the correct side.