The lazy person's guide to getting your transits right

I am impatient with things that don't work well, and in areas of life where I have some expertise, I'm especially bad. This is why I hate astrology apps. I think they're good for people who are dipping a toe in and want a very, very, very basic sense of how astrology works, but they're bad for the following reasons:

1. I haven't found one that accounts for the precession of the solar system, which is in motion. Meaning: it moved since you were born, so in order to know when your transits are exact, you are going to have to do some mental math or get innovative. Stick with me.

2. Some of the definitions of the transits are insane and don't differentiate between harsh aspects and easy ones. They're different!

Personally, when I was learning, I used a few apps, and the one I liked the best had a nice running list of my active Pluto transits at the time, and because it did not account for precession, I had the impression that one of my Pluto transits was over when it wasn't for another 9 months. So I thought "things should be getting better?" and I was still in psychological hell. It would be easy to conclude that astrology is bullshit in a case like this.

So here's the bad news, if you want to read charts, you're going to need to *read actual charts.* Fortunately it's pretty easy if you are comfortable with geometry, wheels, and numbers. It maybe took me a month to get comfortable with what I was looking at and come to terms with the fact that almost everything is moving counter clockwise.

Here's the good news: Hindu astrology does account for the precession of the solar system. Most charting software has the option for "sidereal," and I'm about to sound real ignorant: you have to select an Ayanamsha (I don't know what this means) in order to generate a chart, and selecting Djwal Khool (or DK) gets you a precessed chart! The issue is that it changes the sign and degree of everything in your chart, but if you want to look at when your transits are exact, it's a great tool. Then you can switch back to the tropical zodiac to read the meanings of the planets by house and sign.

Personally, I'm an Apple product user, so I use iPhemeris, because it syncs to all my devices and I can do astrology on the fly (it’s not uncommon for me to be checking someone’s transits while in line at the Costco checkout). Also, I have nerdily contacted the app developer numerous times to report glitches, because fortunately it gets updated a lot, but less fortunately, the updates often break stuff that used to work smoothly (and then I annoy him and then he fixes the issue). Astro.com will also generate sidereal charts for you (and is free) and I love that it gives the warning "Please select this option only if you really know what you are doing." Because with sidereal I really do not know what I'm doing, only that it works much better at exactitude.

How do you get a good definition of transits? Get yourself a copy of the (astrological) bible. Rob Hand is dead and doesn’t pay me to say this. Also, the bible will provide you the way to do actual math to precess your own chart without switching to sidereal, but I am lazy, so I just switch charts to sidereal.

Okay let me actually show you what I’m talking about with my willing guinea pig. We’ll call her GP.

I’m not going to lie, one of the reasons I love iPhemeris is the rainbow charts, which I’m very used to at this point. I know Pisces is purple and my brain automatically fills in that information these days. I’ve annoyed the developer enough that he’s not a huge fan of me and he also doesn’t pay me to say this.

Anyway, if you look at GP’s chart right now you can see that she has a lot going on (ooo look at that 3rd house):

And here’s a different way to look at transits, which gives you a really straightforward sense of GP’s current transits (natal planets are horizontal and transits are vertical):

Don’t fear numbers, basically. I’m highlighting the square from Neptune to Uranus, which is an outer planet transit, but Uranus is in her 12th natally, rules her 2nd house and Neptune rules her 3rd house and is transiting her 3rd house. Something confusing in her environment is having 2nd house impacts, like on security and money. And it’s a close transit, as well as a slow-moving one.

Now we switch to sidereal. Don’t be scared.

All the colors changed! All the planets and points changed signs! It’s disconcerting. But please ignore that fact for a moment. Now we overlay transits.

Here’s the other chart:

And, oooo, look how freaking close Neptune is to Uranus *now.* Anything that’s 0 degrees and less than 10 seconds away is really freaking exact when it’s an outer planet. Neptune’s moving super-slow right now (even for *it*), and this transit was exact on June 6, which I know because I scrolled through time on iPhemeris until I got a 0.0 on the square (not pictured).

36 seconds and 7 seconds is a huge difference when it comes to outer planets. If you do astrology over any amount of time, you will learn this, because things happen with exact transits. You *feel* them when they’re vaguely in the neighborhood, but without fail, things happen when they’re exact.

And poor GP is currently stuck in a foreign country for reasons out of her control, so that’s a very Neptune thing to have happen, impacting money and her environment.

So when I am reading for someone, I look at their tropical/regular charts for a sense of what’s vaguely in the neighborhood of what, and then I switch to sidereal to see how close it *really* is. When I am looking at timing of things for others and for myself, this is what I am doing. It’s not the cleanest, but it is the most efficient way I have found so far.

XO,J