Search the FAQ:
Google
display topic as one page
Personal Daily Horoscope
Transits
Dates
Duration
Language / Interpretation
E-mail
Images
Legend
Extended Daily Horoscpe
 
return to normal view

Frequently asked questions

Free Horoscopes > Personal Daily Horoscope

  1. What's the difference between the Free Daily Horoscope and the Extended Daily Horoscope?

    Please check the AstroShop -> Online services > Extended Daily Horoscope section of the FAQ for the answer.

  2. I have moved - is the Personal Daily Horoscope still valid?

    Yes, it is. The only thing that will change is the exact hour of the transits of the faster-moving planets, including the Moon. If you live in a time zone very different from the one you were born in, you can enter your place of residence by clicking on the link Change reference place at the bottom of the Daily Horoscope page. Here, two procedures are possible:
    • You have already chosen a reference place and want to change it:
      You will see the town you have chosen and next to it a link named other town. Click on that link and enter your new place of residence. Then click on "continue", and the place will be shown in the drop-down menus. Click on "continue" again in order to save the place and to get back to the horoscope page.
    • Your reference place is the same as your birth place:
      Uncheck the box "use birth place" and click on "continue". Choose a country and enter the name of your new place of residence. Then click on "continue", and the place will be shown in the drop-down menus. Click on "continue" again in order to save the place and to get back to the horoscope page.
    The Free Daily Horoscope then gives you the exact hour of transits according to the time zone of your place of residence.

  3. How can a planet be in more than one house during a certain period of a time?

    Every so often, planets become retrograde or 'backwards-moving', when seen from the Earth. When this happens, they move back into the astrological house they have just come from before finally moving on. For example, Mercury could pass from the third house on to the fourth, then back again into the third. After a while, Mercury will change direction again, moving through the last part of the third house in direct motion, before carrying on through the fourth.
    In the Daily Horoscope Calendar, Mercury will be regarded as being in the third house until he finally leaves it, even if he has already been in the fourth house for a while during the same period.
    To get a detailed overview of Mercury's movement, please select the 'Graphical Ephemeris for one year' in the 'extended chart selection -> Astrodienst Special', or visit the 'printable ephemeris section' accessible from our homepage via the menu in the left column.

  4. Could you offer the Void of Course Moon times, both mundane and personal?

    The mundane void of course Moon is listed in the Daily Horoscope under "Mundane Events".
    The personal void of course Moon can easily be deduced from the information given in the Daily Horoscope. We list both, all personal Moon transits and the Moon's ingress into a new sign. Find the last Moon transit in the list. This marks the beginning of your personal void of course Moon. As with the mundane VOC Moon, it ends when the Moon changes signs.

  5. How can I print the Planetary Hours?

    If you click on the blue link "Planetary Hours", you will come to a page with all the details. You can print out this page using the print function of your browser.

  6. How can two people born at different times have exactly the same daily horoscope?

    The daily horoscope is based on the transits of the moving planets in the sky over the planets or other points in a person's birth chart. A transit happens when a moving planet crosses the location of a natal planet, or forms a particular angle (aspect) to it. (see also: FAQ - What are transits?)
    Two people can have one or more natal planets at the same or a very close position. For example, two people, one born on March 7, 1960 and the other born on February 14, 1962 will have their natal Mars at nearly the same position at 9 degrees Aquarius.
    Now, when a moving planet P happens to cross over 9 degrees Aquarius, both will have the transit 'P conjunct Mars'. Depending on what other transits happen for both people at the same time, it is quite possible that both persons will have this identical transit selected on the day of the crossing in their daily horoscope, effectively getting the same daily horoscope for that day.
    Also, all other transits involving natal Mars will happen on the same day for these two, even when they have otherwise very different charts, just because they share the 'same' Mars.

 

 
to topTransits
Frequently asked questions

Daily Horoscope > Transits

  1. What are transits?

    A birth chart shows the state of the heavens at the time and place of birth. However, the planets move on, entering into new relationships with the planetary positions in the birth chart all the time. The passages of the planets over birth positions are called transits.
    Interpreting transits is one of the ancient astrological forecasting methods that can tell you which of your life's themes are likely to become particularly important at a given time.
    For example, transits of fast-moving planets often tell of opportunities, health, moods and states of mind that pass fairly quickly. The slower transits describe cycles of development that take much longer, learning phases, crises, as well as periods of stability and happiness.

  2. What do you mean by "Transit selected for today"?

    On most days, more than one planet is passing over, or transiting, the planetary positions in your birth chart. Astrodienst chooses the most important transit on a particular day for you to read about.
    Some long-term influences can last for months. They can be the most important things happening to you on an astrological level, but in order to avoid repeating the same interpretation every day for months on end, we give you the description of the other influences as well. If you move further down the Daily Horoscope page, you will find links to "Other transits occurring today" and "Important long-term influences".

  3. Why is the list of selected transits not complete for each day?

    The short-term influences are complete for every day. If a transit has not made it into the "long-term" list, it will only appear on the day the transit is exact.
    This list is a selection of three long-term themes, but of course there may be more. The computer picks the most relevant ones, and at the same time creates some variation.
    The Daily Horoscope pages are single page extract from a one-year calendar. In the printed version, you can 'scroll' back and forth and read all the aspects, even if they are not exact on the day.
    If you order the "Personal Horoscope Calendar" or "Transits of the Year", you can see all the information for a whole year in one complete overview. Or, for a similar purpose, you can subscribe to the "Extended Daily Horoscope".
    Alternatively, use the printable "Transit Calendar" in the Extended Chart Selection -> Astrodienst Special. It contains all important transits over a four year period. If you use it with a book like Robert Hand's "Planets in Transit", you can get all the information you want.

  4. Why are "transits selected for today" so often transits by the Moon?

    The Moon is the fastest moving planetary body used for the transits. Therefore it makes most aspects to your natal planets. Other planets such as Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc move more slowly and therefore, it takes longer for them to get to a position where they aspect a natal planet.
    The order of speed, from fast to slow, is: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
    The slower the planet, the longer the influence.

  5. How do you determine which transit is selected for each day?

    We are tipping the scales in the Personal Daily Horoscope, to weigh and select what is most likely relevant. But we cannot simply look for 'the most relevant' transit each day. This would result in the appearance of the same transit reading for a long time, which most people would find boring and silly. Therefore, for each daily horoscope requested on our website, we always compute transits for the whole year for this chart, find the optimal distribution for 365 day-slots and then display the particular day-slot of the requested day.

    Lunar transits, i.e. transits by the moving Moon, have the lowest priority in the selection. The Moon makes its circle through your birth chart in 27 days and repeats all transits with this frequency - while squares, sextiles and trines happen twice within each circle. This makes Moon transits the most frequent and the least interesting events, and they are only used in the Daily Horoscope if nothing better can be found for a given day. How often we have to fall back on a Moon transit for a given chart depends on the overall distribution of the other planets in the chart. They may be "nicely" distributed in such a way, that their transits fill most of the 365 day-slots we have in a given year for the Daily Horoscope. Then you will find few Moon transits. If the other planets are distributed in a way that they often compete for space in the same day slots, while there remain many day-slots to which none of the more important planetary transits can be attributed, then the program has to fall back on Moon transits more often. On average, about 60 out of 365 day slots are filled with Moon transits.

    If for a given day there are several transits competing for the top place in the day slot, the weight evaluation is rather complex. The natal planet is evaluated according to its role in the chart, the nature of the aspect is considered, and slower transiting planets have much more weight than faster ones. But another factor is taken into account: slower transits have a longer duration, and it does not really matter whether you find their reading a few days earlier or later in the Daily Horoscope - they have a long term effect anyway. Therefore, their reading is often shifted to a day when there is nothing else of relevance on that day. Faster transits with a short period of relevance cannot be shifted to another day, so they either get assigned to the current day slot or to none at all. This mechanism often lets a faster transit win for a particular day-slot, because the reading of the slower transit is presented on another day within its period of relevance.

  6. Why does my printed Horoscope Calendar show different transits than the online Daily Horoscope?

    Please find your answer here.

 

 
to topDates
Frequently asked questions

Daily Horoscope > Dates

  1. Can I go back and forth in time further than "yesterday" and "tomorrow"?

    The Personal Daily Horoscope gives you the option to subscribe to the "Extended Daily Horoscope" which allows you to scroll back and forth in time, so that you can read the "nearly-active" long-term influences at your leisure.

  2. Why is my Daily Horoscope a day late / early?

    Try changing the reference place, following the link Change reference place at the bottom of the Daily Horoscope page. The horoscope is always shown with the correct time and date of the reference place you have given.
    For example, if you have changed your reference place to somewhere on the other side of the world (maybe for a relocation chart), you'll get your daily horoscope for the time zone of this new reference place.

    In addition, and actually more important: Transits have what we call an orb: the issue begins already when the two planets involved get near each other and it continues after they have met. The date and time given is the time of the precise encounter between the two planets, but very often the effect is felt way ahead.

  3. Why do I get my "Happy Birthday" horoscope a day before or after my birthday?

    Astrologically, your birthday is on the day on which the Sun in the sky is exactly at the same zodiac degree as the Sun in your birth chart. This does not have to happen on the same date every year. Sometimes it happens a day earlier or later. This is your "astrological birthday".

  4. Why are the transits not listed in chronological order?

    The list is in order of relevance. Because transit timings are interleaved in a complex way, it is not really possible to order them chronologically.

 
to topDuration
Frequently asked questions

Daily Horoscope > Duration

  1. Why do the transits only show up in the list when they have been active for some time before?

    The transits in the Daily Horoscope are only shown when they are exact - or near exact. The activity period may begin much earlier, if, for example, the transiting planet went into orb but did not quite reach exactness, then went retrograde and left the orb. This can be months before the transit actually becomes exact. But in the Daily Horoscope it is still counted as activity period.

    1-degree orbs are used.

    If you order the "Personal Horoscope Calendar" or "Transits of the Year", you can see all the information for a whole year in one complete overview. Or, for a similar purpose, subscribe to the "Extended Daily Horoscope".
    Alternatively, use the printable "Transit Calendar" in the Extended Chart Selection -> Astrodienst special. It contains all important transits over a three year period. If you use it with a book like Robert Hand's "Planets in Transit", you can get all the information you want.

  2. Why do my Mercury / Venus transits last for several weeks, or even months when they usually only last for a few days?

    If Mercury or Venus become retrograde during a certain period of time, they come back over the transits they have made before (when in direct motion). The total time shown in the Daily Horoscope is from the point when a transit is in orb for the first time, until it has been repeated (twice) due to the retrograde loop and goes out of orb.

 
to topLanguage / Interpretation
Frequently asked questions

Daily Horoscope > Language and Interpretation

  1. The different language versions are not identical. Why is this the case and which is the original?

    The basis for the daily horoscope is Robert Hand's book 'Planets in Transit', which exists also in German, Dutch and Italian book editions.
    Astrodienst holds the world-wide exclusive rights to use Robert Hand's text for computer horoscopes. In the early 1990s, we created the Personal Horoscope Calendar, a printed calendar with one column of transit readings for each day. To fit into the available space of the text column, the original text was shortened by astrological editors in each language. Different languages have different space requirements, German for example runs about 15% longer than English for the same text - this means more sentences need to be cut in the German version than in the English. Different editors also made different decisions how to shorten the text. The text from this printed edition is now used online for the Daily Horoscope.

    The various language editions have come into existence in complicated ways. This explains the differences in wording. There are many ways to illuminate a particular transit - it is not that one way of describing it is fundamentally more valid than another. This is not how astrology works. Therefore all the different versions are valid in their own way.

    Chiron was not yet discovered when Robert Hand wrote 'Planets in Transit'. The Chiron readings for the daily horoscope have been added by Astrodienst staff writers.

  2. The tone of the interpretations is sometimes quite negative. Can't you write more cheerful things?

    We do not sugarcoat everything. In most cases only part of the text describes the challenging aspects. If you read all paragraphs, you will often find that it is not at all that negative, even when it indeed starts off that way.
    There might be a few texts which do not have a brighter tone at all. These are either aspects which are challenging by nature, or - if not - they will be revised by and by.

  3. The interpretation of the transit should take signs and houses into account.

    There is a limit to what a human author can possibly produce. Robert Hand wrote already more than 600 pages, just to cover the aspects of the planetary pairs in transit. To extend that material by taking into account the natal house position and/or the transiting planet's house position, could have easily multiplied the text amount by a factor of 5 - 10, i.e. gone to 3000 - 6000 pages. No astrological author can possibly cover that amount of material without running dry and stale, and no publisher could afford to translate such a volume of text into another language - or find buyers for a boring 6000 page 'cookbook'.
    These are some of the limitations of our trade. I think the synthesis must often happen in the heads of the readers - learn something about houses, and combine that knowledge with the transit readings you find here.

    Please run a natal chart separately, if you are not already aware in which houses the transits happen. There is plenty to choose from in our 'Extended Chart Selection'.

  4. The Daily Horoscope often refers to work and career. But I am a pensioner and these references don't apply to me. Can't you offer different versions for different age groups?

    Such a request is rather difficult, because people can be professionally active or interested in their work to a high age. We don't know which type our customers belong to.

    Nevertheless, we have edited the references to career issues, so that from the age of 60 an adjusted text appears. Hopefully, this will satisfy those who have stopped working at that age.

 

 
to topE-mail
Frequently asked questions

Daily Horoscope > E-mail

  1. Is it possible to get the Daily Horoscope by e-mail?

    No, we don't send it by E-mail. But there is an easy way to get quick access to it: put a bookmark to your daily horoscope at your desktop, and it will always be there for you at exactly one mouseclick.

  2. How can I e-mail my Daily Horoscope to a friend?

    The easiest way is to use the "send page" feature at the top left of the Daily Horoscope. It is marked with a little letter icon.

    This is the safest way, as the recipient will only be able to read this page but not to access your profile.

 

 
to topImages
Frequently asked questions

Daily Horoscope > Images

  1. Tell me more about the drawings in the Daily Horoscope!

    The German artist Gerda Madl Kren did the pen-and-ink drawings and collages, all in 14 x 7 cm format for the Personal Daily Horoscope. We added a slight colour tone for the web application, the originals were all in black ink and scanned in dithering mode.
    The artist created a huge collection of images. Our (then) staff member Klaus Köhler associated the drawings with the actual transits. It is not a totally fixed association, but there is a certain random element imbedded in the programming which image is selected from the list of image candidates for each text. A balance is made so that there are few image repetitions in the course of the year. A different person with the same transit might get a different picture.
    These images have been designed especially for Astrodienst and are not published otherwise.

  2. I find some of the drawings (sexually) offensive! What can I do?

    We can only recommend you to de-activate the images.
    Please go to My Astro and click on the link View/Edit preferences. Here you can activate the checkbox beside "Suppress images in Daily Horoscope".

 

 
to topLegend
Frequently asked questions

Daily Horoscope > Legend

  1. What does "weak, transient influence" mean?

    The influence is only slight and temporary. It usually lasts a few hours or a day at the most.

  2. What is the meaning of the "ingress" and "lunar phase" information?

    The Daily Horoscope page also lists some astronomical events like the Sun's ingress into a new sign or the lunar phases. These events are not personal, and have no personal meaning for you.

  3. What do the asterisks ( *, ** or *** ) mean?

    Particularly important transits are indicated by one, two or three asterisks next to the title of the transit selected for the day. One asterisk (*) means that the transit is more important than most, two (**) indicate an important transit, three (***) show that the transit is a major astrological event.

  4. What do the letters in brackets behind the information on eclipses mean?

    t  -  "total" eclipse of the Moon / Sun
    p -  "partial" eclipse of the Moon / Sun
    u -  "penumbra" (Lunar) eclipse, i.e. the Moon enters the half-shadow cone of the Earth but not the core shadow. The "u" was chosen because of the Latin word "umbra" which means "shadow". It is hard to notice such an eclipse.
    a -  "annular" (Solar) eclipse (ring-formed): the Moon is too far away for its disk to completely cover the Solar disk. At the peak time of the eclipse, a ring of the Sun's disk is still visible.

    Most astrologers who work with eclipses do not take their visible quality into account, neither do they consider whether someone is in the path of visibility of a Solar eclipse or far away. All they are concerned with is whether an eclipse has taken place or not.

  5. What does "Moon at natal angle" mean?

    It means that on that particular today, the angle between transiting Sun and transiting Moon is exactly the same as the angle formed by your natal Sun and natal Moon. For example, if your natal Sun and Moon form a 92° waxing square, the symbol for "Moon at natal angle" will turn up in the Daily Horoscope on the day the transiting Sun and Moon form a 92° waxing square.
    This information is used in CosmoBiology, a theory that claims that this is the most fertile phase in a woman's monthly cycle. Some women use this theory for birth control. (see also FAQ -> Free Horoscopes -> Charts -> Astrodienst special)

 

Copyright © 2007 Astrodienst AG  - report a problem  -  Send page