Weekly horoscope

How the dates and houses are worked out

A weekly or monthly horoscope written in advance is fiction — nothing in it responds to anything. What can be stated in advance, accurately, is where the Moon will be: new moons, quarters and full moons are fixed astronomical events, and their moments are known years ahead.

• Phases — the moment the true angle between the Moon and the Sun crosses 0°, 90°, 180° or 270°, to the minute.
• Sign changes — the moment the Moon’s longitude crosses a multiple of 30°.
• Eclipses — a new or full moon close enough to the ecliptic, a test that picks out every one of the 32 eclipses between 2024 and 2030 and no false ones.

The house comes from counting your sign as the first: for Leo, a new moon in Scorpio is in the fourth house, for Taurus the same new moon is in the seventh. That is where the twelve readings part company, and it is the traditional basis of sun-sign forecasting.

Why this is a list rather than a story

The dates are astronomy — the same for everyone and fixed long before anyone asked. What is added is the geometry between each event and your sign, and a traditional reading of the house it falls in. Anything beyond that would be invention, and inventing it is what makes most long-range horoscopes worthless. It is less dramatic than a prediction and has the advantage of being checkable against any ephemeris.

Solar houses are an approximation of your real chart: with a birth time, the same events land in houses of their own. A birth chart is where that starts, and today’s horoscope applies the same method to a single day.