Your Sun sign
The Sun sign you were born under — a mirror of temperament, not a fate.
The Sun sign you were born under — a mirror of temperament, not a fate.
Your Western tropical Sun sign always; your Moon sign and rising sign (ascendant) too, once you give a birth time — the rising sign needs a birthplace as well.
Sun sign comes from a fixed month/day boundary table, with an honest cusp flag when your birthday falls within about a day of a boundary — and once you add a birth time and birthplace, from the ephemeris at your birth instant instead, which settles the cusp. Moon sign is read from real ephemeris data, since the Moon moves roughly 13° a day and needs your exact birth time. Rising sign is computed from local sidereal time and the true obliquity of the date at your birthplace.
This is the tropical zodiac — 30° arcs measured from the equinox, not the sidereal system Vedic astrology uses (see /vedic). We don't build a full 12-house chart. Your birth time is read on the clock your birthplace actually kept that day — daylight saving and old time zones included — except in the one hour a year when clocks were turned back and that time happened twice, where the page gives both answers when they differ.
What is Western astrology? · Western vs. Vedic — what's the actual difference?
The Moon moves about 13° a day, crossing into a new sign roughly every two and a half days, and the rising sign changes about every two hours — without a real birth time, either could land in the wrong sign.
No. This is the Western tropical zodiac, measured in 30° arcs from the equinox. Vedic (Jyotish) astrology is sidereal, measured against the fixed stars — the two systems can place the same birth in different signs.
Give this page a birthday and the Sun-sign part of the answer is a single lookup: which of twelve stretches of the calendar your date falls in. The table it reads has never been on this screen, so here it is — the same twelve rows the answer comes out of, with the glyph and the element each row carries.
| Sign | Starts | Days it owns | Element |
|---|---|---|---|
| ♈ Aries | March 21 | 30 | Fire |
| ♉ Taurus | April 20 | 31 | Earth |
| ♊ Gemini | May 21 | 31 | Air |
| ♋ Cancer | June 21 | 32 | Water |
| ♌ Leo | July 23 | 31 | Fire |
| ♍ Virgo | August 23 | 31 | Earth |
| ♎ Libra | September 23 | 30 | Air |
| ♏ Scorpio | October 23 | 30 | Water |
| ♐ Sagittarius | November 22 | 30 | Fire |
| ♑ Capricorn | December 22 | 29 | Earth |
| ♒ Aquarius | January 20 | 30 | Air |
| ♓ Pisces | February 19 | 30 | Water |
Read the day column downward and the surprise is that it never settles. The signs are twelve arcs of thirty degrees each, exactly equal by construction — but as runs of calendar days they come in four different lengths, from 29 to 32, and only six of the twelve are exactly thirty days long. Capricorn is the short one and Cancer the long one, and the gap between them is three whole days. In a leap year the extra date falls inside Pisces, so even the column itself is not fixed.
The unevenness is not the table being sloppy. Earth's orbit is an ellipse, so our distance from the Sun changes through the year: in the year we measured, the closest day was January 4, 2025 and the farthest July 3, 2025. A planet sweeps fastest when it is closest, which means the Sun appears to slide through the zodiac quickest in early January and slowest in early July — so a thirty-degree arc costs fewer days in the first case and more in the second. Look at where those two dates land in the table above: the closest day sits in Capricorn and the farthest in Cancer, which are precisely the shortest and the longest rows.
We can check that without the table at all. Asking the ephemeris for the moments the Sun actually crosses each thirty-degree line — twelve consecutive arcs across one solar year, March 20, 2025 to March 20, 2026 — gives arcs that run from 29.45 days to 31.45 days and sum to 365.24. Those are different numbers from the table's whole days, because they are a different measurement: one counts calendar dates, the other counts real time between two instants. But they put the same sign at each end, Capricorn shortest and Cancer longest, and they were computed by a route that never touches the boundary table.
One more thing falls out of the Starts column: every boundary lands between the 19th and the 23rd of its month, and there is exactly one boundary in each of the twelve months. Nothing sits near the first or the last day. That is why the cusp check can look at the day before and the day after your birthday without ever having to reason about month ends or about how long February is.
The element column is the plainest pattern here. Fire, earth, air, water — then the same four again, and again, until the circle closes. Element is nothing but position counted four at a time, which is why any two signs sharing an element sit a whole multiple of four rows apart. Nothing about your birthday is consulted for it beyond which row you landed in.
This section is only about the Sun-sign lookup. The birth time and birthplace fields above feed a different machine entirely — the Moon sign and the ascendant come from ephemeris data rather than from any table — and the honest size of the doubt at a boundary is measured elsewhere, on the page this screen links to.