Horoscope today

How the daily readings are worked out

Almost every daily horoscope online is written weeks ahead and rotated through a schedule. Nothing about it changes when the sky does, which is an odd property for something claiming to describe the sky. These are computed instead, in three steps.

1. The Moon’s position today — its sign, degree and phase.
2. The angle to each sign. The distance between the Moon’s sign and yours gives an aspect: conjunction, semi-sextile, sextile, square, trine, quincunx or opposition.
3. The house. Count your own sign as the first, and the Moon’s sign lands in one of twelve areas of life — money in the second, partners in the seventh, career in the tenth.

Change the date and every reading changes with it.

All three are checkable. The Moon’s sign and phase are printed in any astronomical almanac, and if our figures disagree, we are wrong. The lunar longitude comes from NASA JPL’s DE440 ephemeris and is accurate to about an arcsecond, so the sign is correct to within seconds of a change; the phase is taken from the true angle between the Moon and the Sun rather than an average month. The full formulas are on the methodology page.

None of that makes astrology predictive. It makes the output honest about its own method, which is a lower bar and one worth clearing anyway.

Lucky numbers, colors and hours

Each sign’s numbers, color and best hours are derived from the date and the sign together, so everyone born under the same sign sees the same ones and they genuinely change at midnight. Sites that randomize them per visit are offering a slot machine you can pull until the answer improves. The two fixed numbers for each sign are the traditional ones from its sign profile.

What a sun-sign horoscope cannot do

The Moon is in the same sign for everyone on Earth today. Twelve readings for eight billion people is not a personal forecast, and no honest version of one can be — a real forecast would need your birth time and place, not just your month.

What a daily horoscope can be is a note on the general weather and a prompt to check how you are actually doing. Read it that way and it costs you nothing. Read it as instructions and you have handed your decisions to a rock 384,000 kilometres away.

• About you, not your month: a birth chart — it needs your time of birth, and it says considerably more.
• The next day: tomorrow’s horoscope.
• Longer spans: the weekly, monthly and yearly pages.

All twelve signs in detail →