Planets in retrograde right now and in 2026

Why the lengths differ so much

Retrograde length is a function of relative speed, not of importance. Mercury orbits in 88 days and laps Earth roughly every four months, so its apparent reversal is quick and frequent — about three weeks, three times a year. Saturn takes 29 years to orbit and barely moves against us at all, so Earth’s own motion dominates the geometry and Saturn appears to reverse for over four months every single year.

That is worth holding onto when you read that a planet is retrograde. For Saturn it is close to the default condition — roughly a third of all time. A rule that treats it as an exceptional window is treating a third of your life as exceptional.

The shadow periods, defined

Astrologers talk about the “shadow” or “storm” either side of a retrograde, but the dates are usually given by eye. They do not need to be. A planet enters its pre-retrograde shadow the moment it first reaches the degree the retrograde will end on, and leaves the post-retrograde shadow when it returns to the degree the retrograde began on. Both are crossings of a known longitude, so both can be found exactly — which is what every planet page here does.

Stations are found the same way for every planet: the moment its daily motion against the stars changes sign, read from NASA JPL’s DE440 ephemeris. A second program, Swiss Ephemeris, lands within 2 minutes of every station from Mercury to Neptune between 1900 and 2050, and within 17 for Pluto, which barely moves for days either side of a turn.

The Sun and Moon never do this

Neither the Sun nor the Moon can be retrograde as seen from Earth, because neither is being overtaken — the Sun is what we orbit and the Moon orbits us. Any chart or app showing a retrograde Sun is showing an error. The lunar nodes are the opposite case: the mean node moves backward all the time by construction, so for the nodes the label tells you nothing.