Aspects: The Angles Between Your Planets

Below the placements table, the Sky chart panel has a section labeled Aspects. Click it open and you get a short list — up to eight rows — each one a pair of planets and a symbol between them. An aspect is simply the angular distance between two bodies as measured along the ecliptic, and certain angles have carried specific meanings since antiquity.

The five angles the panel measures, and nothing else

Our engine implements exactly five aspects: conjunction at 0 degrees, sextile at 60, square at 90, trine at 120, and opposition at 180. These are the five major aspects laid out by Ptolemy in the Tetrabiblos in the second century CE, and they derive geometrically from dividing a 360-degree circle evenly — by 1, 6, 4, 3, and 2 respectively. No minor aspects, no quincunx, no semisquare — the panel does not compute them, so you will never see one listed here.

Each aspect carries an orb, the number of degrees of wiggle room the engine allows before it stops counting two planets as being in aspect. Our values are conjunction 8 degrees, sextile 6, square 7, trine 8, and opposition 8. The panel only records one aspect per pair of planets, on the reasoning that the orbs of the five majors never overlap enough to produce a genuine tie.

Why orb size is a tradition choice, not a physical law

Ptolemy himself gave the five angles very little text and never used the word aspect for what later tradition built into a full doctrine. The specific degree-ranges of wiggle room are a later development — orb conventions were worked out and debated across the medieval period, and they still vary by practitioner today. Modern practice commonly gives the Sun and Moon the widest orbs, tightens up for the personal planets, and tightens further still for the outer planets. Our engine's flat 6-to-8-degree range across all five aspects is one workable convention among several that circulate in the field, not the single correct answer.

How the panel decides which aspects to show you, and how it talks about them

The Aspects section checks every possible pair of bodies, keeps the ones that fall inside an orb, and sorts the results tightest-first — the closest, most exact angles rise to the top of the list. Click a row and it expands into a composed reading built from the specific pair and aspect type. The panel also flags exactness directly in its language: an orb under one degree gets called "Exact right now — this one is loud," and anything under three degrees gets "Tight orb — clearly felt." That is the panel's own framing of how much weight to give a reading, not a claim that a wider-orb aspect is meaningless.

Each aspect type carries a one-line character in the interpretation layer — square is read as grinding, trine as flowing, and so on for all five — and that language is squarely in the astrological-tradition register. Traditionally, astrologers hold that a square generates friction and productive tension between the two placements involved, and that a trine indicates an easy, unforced flow between them. None of that is a claim about anything two planets are physically doing to each other; it is a symbolic reading layered on top of a real geometric fact.

Why the aspect list changes if you change the moment

Aspects are computed fresh from whichever moment and location the sky map is currently showing, the same as every other section of the chart panel. Scrub the time controls forward a few days and watch the list reshuffle — planets that move quickly, like the Moon, drift in and out of aspect within hours, while an aspect between two slow outer planets can hold for weeks. If you have saved a birth date and time, jumping to "My birth sky" shows you the aspect pattern that was locked in at that instant; that pattern is your natal aspect set, distinct from whatever aspects tonight's sky happens to be forming, which is the separate calculation behind the panel's "Your transits" section.

What this means for you tonight

Open the Aspects section and find whichever row sits closest to the top of the list — that is your tightest, most exact angle right now. Note the two bodies involved and their orb, then check the same two bodies' rows in the placements table above to see their signs and houses side by side; a tight square between a personal planet and an outer one is worth sitting with for a minute longer than a wide, eight-degree trine, precisely because the panel itself treats exactness as the thing that matters most.

For the placements each aspect connects, see the placements table explained. For how the same five aspects get recalculated against tonight's moving sky instead of a fixed chart, see your transits explained, and for the full tour of the panel these all live inside, see reading your sky chart.