Most people know their Sun sign and stop there. Your Moon sign and your Rising sign ask for two more things: the exact time and place you were born. Give it those, and this calculator will tell you where the Sun and Moon were that day, and which sign was climbing over the eastern horizon at that moment.
Everything is calculated in your browser. Your date, time and city are never sent anywhere and never stored.
Don't know your birth time? You can still get your Sun and Moon. Not your Rising sign, and further down I explain why.
These three points are the ones people name most often, and they are a small part of what a birth chart holds. The houses are missing, so are the aspects between one planet and another, the lunar nodes, Chiron, and above all how all of it relates to itself, which is where a chart starts saying something specific about a life instead of listing traits.
You can still get your Sun and your Moon. The Sun changes sign once a month, so unless you were born on the day it changed, your Sun sign is certain. The Moon moves faster, changing roughly every two and a half days, so sometimes it is settled and sometimes two possibilities remain. The calculator will tell you which of those two situations you are in.
The Rising sign, or ascendant, is a different matter. Without birth time there is no way to calculate it, and no way around that. Some calculators fill the missing hour with noon and hand you a Rising sign anyway. That number means nothing. If your time is written on your birth certificate or hospital records, it is worth digging out.
Because the Rising sign is the point of the zodiac coming up over the eastern horizon, and that horizon keeps moving as the Earth turns. All twelve signs pass across it in a day.
What gets told badly is that they take the same amount of time. They do not, and the gap is wide. In London, Pisces clears the horizon in under an hour while Libra takes nearly three. In New York the gap is narrower, but it is still more than double. It also shifts with latitude and with the time of year. So the two-hour rule is a rough average and nothing more, which is why an estimated birth time so often lands on the wrong sign.
Two separate reasons. One is the time zone: to calculate anything, we need to know what time it actually was when the clock on the wall said three in the afternoon, and that depends on the country, the date, and whether daylight saving was running that day. The other is your position on the globe. Latitude and longitude decide which part of the zodiac was rising over your horizon rather than somebody else's.
Two people born at the same instant in London and in Buenos Aires share a Sun and a Moon, and have different Rising signs.
It means you were born close to the moment one sign handed over to the next. Worth clearing up something that gets repeated a lot: signs do not overlap and do not blend. At the exact instant you were born, the Sun was in one or in the other.
What is true is that if the recorded time is off by a few minutes, or if the changeover fell on your birthday, the sign may be the neighbouring one. When the calculator sees a position sitting less than a degree from the boundary, it says so, so that you know this is a case where the time is worth pinning down before taking anything for granted.
They get called the Big Three, and it is a handy way of naming where you start when you read a chart.
The Sun has to do with the centre of the identity, with what a person recognises as their own and stands on. The Moon shows up before thought does, in the needs and in the reactions that arrive without passing through the head. And the Rising sign is the way of turning towards the world, what people meet in you as you come through a door and before you have said anything.
None of the three describes a whole person. When they contradict each other, which happens often, that is usually the interesting part.
No. Your own browser does the calculation using tables downloaded from this site, and your date, time and city never leave your device.
To be exact about it: the server records that somebody visited this page, as any website does, but it cannot see what you typed into the form, because that is never sent.
The tropical zodiac, the one Western astrology works with, where the signs are counted from the point at which the Sun crosses the celestial equator at the March equinox. Positions come from Astronomy Engine, an open source astronomy library, and city coordinates and time zones come from GeoNames.
Positions are given in degrees and arcminutes. The degree you see is the real one for the moment you entered, not rounded off to the whole sign.