☉ Birth chart
Birth chart
Where the lights stood at the hour you were born, and how they looked at one another.
☉ Birth chart
Where the lights stood at the hour you were born, and how they looked at one another.
A birth chart is where the Sun, the Moon and the planets stood at the moment you were born, laid out by sign and by house. This one is built from your date, time and place of birth: the signs first, then the houses, then the aspects - the angles between planets, which are what make a chart yours rather than a list of positions. The calculation is free and takes a second; reading it takes longer.
Date, time and place. The place is not decoration: the houses depend on latitude, and a chart built on the wrong city is a chart of somebody else. The time is the most precise of the three and the usual problem - the ascendant moves about a degree every four minutes, so «around seven» and «seven exactly» can put a different sign on the horizon.
Not with the aspects. Three things first: the Sun is what you are essentially occupied with, the Moon is what you need in order to be all right, and the ascendant is how you are read before you have said anything. Then look at which houses those three are in, and only then go on to the rest. A chart read backwards turns into a list of contradictions, because there are always contradictions in one.
The Moon's phase at birth is how far the Moon had run ahead of the Sun at the moment you were born, and how much of its disc was lit. The cycle from one new Moon to the next takes about 29.5 days, and it is divided into eight phases of roughly three and a half days each: new Moon, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full Moon, waning gibbous, last quarter and waning crescent. New Moon, the quarters and full Moon here are not a single moment but the few days around it. The phase comes from the same positions of the Sun and Moon as the chart itself. If the birth time is unknown and the Moon moved into the next phase that day, both are named.
It names no dates and answers no yes-or-no question - that is what a reading is for. It diagnoses nothing and predicts no deaths. With no birth time at all a chart can still be built for noon: almost every planet will be in the right sign, the houses and the ascendant will not, and those have to be set aside. That is more honest than guessing a time and reading somebody else's chart.