Body, Placement, House: How to Read the Placements Table

Scroll past Rising and Midheaven in the Sky chart panel and you land on a plain table: three columns, eleven rows. It looks like the least dramatic part of the whole chart. It is also the part doing the most raw computation, because every row is a live position for a real object in the sky at the exact moment you have selected.

What the three columns actually contain

The table's header row reads Body, Placement, House, exactly as it appears in the panel. Body lists all ten chart bodies — Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto — plus an eleventh row for the North Node, each with its glyph. Placement gives the degree-minute position within a sign, formatted like fourteen degrees thirty-two minutes Leo, plus a retrograde marker on any body currently moving backward against the stars. House gives the Whole Sign house number, one through twelve, that the body falls into from your Rising sign.

Click any row and the sky camera swings to aim at that body and opens it in Observe mode, the close-up 3D view. The table doubles as a set of shortcuts into the rest of the page, not just a readout.

Why the retrograde mark is astronomy, not astrology

The little retrograde symbol next to a Placement entry is computed the same way for every body: the engine samples a body's geocentric ecliptic longitude, checks whether it decreased over a six-hour step, and flags retrograde if it did. That is a real, observable motion — the planet's apparent path against the background stars is genuinely running backward for a while, a perspective effect of orbital speeds, not an illusion of the chart. Sun and Moon are hard-excluded from ever showing the mark, because neither one can appear to move backward from Earth.

What the mark means beyond the astronomy is a separate, attributed layer. Traditionally, astrologers read a retrograde period as a time to revisit and reconsider rather than launch something new — a framing the tradition applies to the astronomical fact, not something the fact itself proves.

Why the House column uses Whole Sign, and why that number might differ elsewhere

Every House number in this table comes from Whole Sign houses: whichever sign contains your Rising degree becomes house one in its entirety, the next sign around the zodiac becomes house two, and so on, all the way around. A body's House number is simply how many signs away its own sign sits from the Rising sign.

This is a real, old choice, not a shortcut. Whole Sign was the primary house system in Hellenistic astrology from roughly the first century BCE onward, and it has seen a genuine revival among modern practitioners working from that older textual tradition. Most consumer astrology apps default to Placidus instead, a different and later system that divides the sky by time rather than by whole signs. Because the two systems assign house cusps differently, the same birth data can land a planet in a different house number on our chart than it does on an app using Placidus — that is an expected structural difference between two legitimate systems, not an error in either one.

Why one row can look wrong if your details are off

Every Placement and House value in this table depends on the exact moment and observer location currently active on the sky map, not automatically on a saved birth chart unless you have entered one. If you have set your birth date and time in the sky controls and jumped to "My birth sky," the table reflects that instant. Also worth remembering: the chart reuses the observer coordinates currently set on the map, not a geocoded birth city, so if your location is set somewhere other than where you were actually born, the House column in particular can drift, since house cusps are the part of a chart most sensitive to location.

What this means for you tonight

Find your Sun's row in the table and note its House number, then count that many signs forward from your Rising sign by hand — house one is Rising's own sign, house two is the next sign over, and so on — to see the Whole Sign logic work in real time rather than trusting the table blind. If the House number for a planet feels off compared to a reading you got somewhere else, check whether that other source used Placidus; a difference there is the two systems disagreeing by design, not a mistake on either side.

For how the Rising sign at the top of house one gets set in the first place, see reading your sky chart. For the full mechanics of what each house arena means, see the twelve houses explained. For the row just above this table, see your midheaven explained, and for what happens when today's sky forms an angle back to one of these placements, see your transits explained.