Lesson 6: Design Your Dream Relationship
Transits: Love Planets in Motion
A “transit chart” is basically a snapshot of where the planets are right now—or where they were at a specific date and time. Transit charts are incredibly useful for timing events and making predictions. If you’re planning a wedding, a party, a big pitch meeting, an important conversation or a move, you could look at where the planets will be transiting on that date.
Find The Current Transits
Want to know where the planets are right now? There are several ways to get the current transits:
- Check an ephemeris (a book of tables listing the planets in motion each day)
- Make a chart online, but instead of inputting a person’s birth data, you input the time, date and place of the event
- Run a “Natal + Transits” chart on on a site like astro.com
Plan It by The Planets: Find Transits for a Past or Future Event
Just as you’ve been running your own chart at astrostyle.com/free-chart, you can use that same tool to plug in an event and see where all the planets are lining up. For example, let’s say you are planning your wedding for April 14, 2020 at 6PM in Maui, Hawaii and you want to know if that’s the best possible day...or what challenges you might need to pre-empt in order to make sure it all goes smoothly. Run a chart for April 14, 2020 at 3:00 p.m. in Maui and you’ll see what the cosmic deal is.
Don’t like the transits? You can pick a different date, or even move to a different time. For example, if you’re not happy with the Ascendant or house placements at 3PM, you might start an hour or two later when another sign is on the ascendant and the overall mood will have shifted.
You can also look back to a significant event in your personal history—a breakup, the day you met your spouse, the date you found out you were pregnant, the year your family suddenly moved and you had to switch schools. Where were the planets then? You may see some surprising clues!
Real-Life Example
Ophi picked October 20, 2007 as her wedding date. She knew the ceremony would be at sunset (around 6PM). So all the way back in November 2006, when Ophi got engaged, she could already cast a transit chart for her wedding day. She could see that the moon was going to be in Aquarius, the sign of group gatherings and friendship—which felt right, since there would be guests from all over the world, and she wanted more of a lively party than a touchy-feely vibe. Mercury would be retrograde, which Ophi was able to work around by knowing this in advance, and she made sure all the technology and travel arrangements were rock-solid. There was an issue with a microphone not working, but since Ophi knew Mercury retrograde would show up somehow, she’d brought along a backup.
Planets In Transit
Below is a chart of the planets and the time it takes each to orbit around the Sun. Divide that time into 12 (for each of the 12 zodiac signs) and you’ll have an idea of how long a planet generally stays in one zodiac sign. For example, Jupiter takes 12-13 years to orbit around the sun. On average, it stays in one zodiac sign for 1 year, or 12-13 months. Pluto, on the other hand, is a little wonky, staying in a signs from 12-20 years variably.
Transiting | Planet | Full transit around the Sun (and complete zodiac) | Time spent in each zodiac sign (avg) | What the transit influences in your life and birth chart | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Sun (Actually, the Earth) | 1 year | 1 month | Self-love, public image, fertility, creative expression, ego | |
 | Moon | N/A | 2-3 days | Sensitivity, emotions, desires | |
 | Mercury | 88 days | 3 weeks |
| |
 | Venus | 225 days | 5 weeks |
| |
 | Mars | 685 days | 8 weeks |
| |
 | Jupiter | 12-13 years | 1 year |
| |
 | Saturn | 28-29 years | 2.5-3 years |
| |
 | Uranus | 84 years | 7 years |
| |
 | Neptune | 165 years | 15 years |
| |
 | Pluto | 284 years | 12-20 years |
| |
  | Nodes | 18 years | 18 months | Karma, destiny, spiritual evolution |
Note that this is not an exact schedule. Retrogrades can cause a planet to linger in a zodiac sign for a whole lot longer than usual. That’s because normally, the transiting planet moves forward in the sign, one degree at a time. But during the retrograde, it appears to be going backward, and indeed it begins to reverse its transit through that sign, moving backward degree by degree. After the retrograde ends, the planet will go forward through the sign again, but it has to make up for lost time—much like a car that’s gotten stuck in traffic or delayed by an inconvenient detour.
Mars, which usually spends 6-8 weeks in a sign, can spend an entire 8 months in one or two signs when it turns retrograde every two years.