Concepts

Elongation is how many degrees a planet stands from the Sun in the sky. That number decides whether it can be seen at night; the product calculates it and says nothing about brightness or height above the horizon.

A station is the moment a body's apparent motion passes through zero and changes sign — one instant, with no tolerance around it. This product publishes that instant, publishes no shadow period beside it, and prints no degree for it, because the record the engine computes does not carry one.

Between 1940 and 2016 Turkey applied daylight saving time in pieces and irregularly; the IANA time zone database the engine reads records 99 offset changes across those years. What an hour of offset error costs on the Ascendant — about fifteen degrees — and how the product marks the uncertainty.

A calculator that asks only for a date and a time does not find the rising sign roughly — it does not find it at all, because the horizon line is defined by the latitude and longitude of the birth place. Within Turkey alone, the east-west difference is worth about nineteen degrees of Ascendant.

The rising sign is not a second sun sign. It is the exact degree of the ecliptic on the eastern horizon at the moment of birth, it is what seeds the house wheel, and it moves fast enough that a birth time off by a few minutes can shift it.

Mercury turns retrograde three or four times a year, for about three weeks each time, and roughly one person in five is born during one of those windows. What the apparent reversal actually is, and why the product publishes the dates without publishing a warning.

Black Moon Lilith is not a body, it is a calculated point in the Moon's orbit, and it comes in two versions that can sit up to about ten degrees apart on the same day. Both are on a Lizastro chart, and neither is the more correct one.

Six ways of dividing the same sky produce six different sets of house cusps from the same planets. Placidus is the default and the most common system in use; whole sign is the oldest and the most forgiving of an uncertain birth time.

An aspect is only counted when two bodies sit within a stated tolerance of an exact angle, and that tolerance is the orb. Lizastro uses 8 degrees for a conjunction or opposition and less for every smaller angle, and the tolerance narrows the same amount a user is allowed to narrow it.

The nodes are not planets. They are the two points where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic, always exactly opposite each other, and they are the reason eclipses only ever happen in certain parts of the zodiac.

A birth chart needs a date, a time and a place. Losing the time does not lose the chart — it removes exactly the pieces that time computes, and nothing else, and the size of what is lost is a real, bounded number rather than a mystery.

The Moon moves about thirteen times faster than the Sun, so its sign changes every two to three days rather than once a month. What that speed actually requires to compute, and what it does not require.

Synastry is the same aspect arithmetic a single chart uses, run across every body in one chart against every body in another. The compatibility score is a weighted sum of the contacts found, centred on 50 — not a verdict on the relationship.

The Sun sign is set by the calendar date; the rising sign is set by the exact minute and place. They move at a ratio of roughly fifteen to one, which is the entire reason they agree only about one time in twelve.

A sign's element is its position in the zodiac taken modulo four; its modality is the same position modulo three. Four elements times three modalities is twelve unique pairs — and the real reason same-element signs sit in trine.

A planet's cycle length divided by twelve gives the average time it spends in each sign, and that single number is what actually sorts the ten bodies into personal, social and generational. Only three of them are slow enough to earn the last label.

This product takes a position on whether the calculation is correct, which is checkable, and no position on whether astrology is true, which is not. What is actually computed, what reaches the writing, and exactly where the uncertainty sits.

A transit is the same aspect arithmetic a natal chart uses, run between where the sky is today and where it was at birth. The orbs are narrower, self-contact is kept rather than skipped, and the four chart angles are not part of it yet.

A Saturn return is not a special kind of transit. It is the one case a transit search does not skip a body meeting its own natal degree, checked against a 4-degree orb — a real, derivable date, and no dedicated feature or crisis attached to it.

Dignity sorts into five states — domicile, exaltation, peregrine, detriment, fall — and two of the five are derived by opposition rather than hand-tabulated. Three signs get a genuinely different answer depending on which rulership table is used.

A moon phase measures the Moon's angle from the Sun, not how full it looks — the two can disagree, and only the angle tells a waxing gibbous from a waning one. The eight named phases are not equal widths, and the math behind them is exact.

Swiss Ephemeris is the planetary-position library the wider astrology-software industry treats as the reference. Reading from it is parity with a shared standard, not a discovery of a more accurate one — and the exact version this product runs is stated, not implied.

Chiron is a real minor planet, not a computed point like Lilith or the nodes — a genuine ephemeris position on an unusually eccentric orbit. Its position is exact astronomy; the wounded-healer reading is an inherited naming tradition, and the two are worth telling apart.