What did the sky look like when you were born?

Put in your birth date, time and place and we'll rebuild the sky as it was at that moment, from where you were: the Sun, the Moon and every planet in its real direction, set at its real distance. You can stand in it, turn around, and fly out past Saturn to look back at Earth.

See your birth sky

Not a star map, a sky you can move through

Most "sky on the day you were born" sites give you a flat circle of constellations: a nice poster, but you can't tell what's near and what's far. We draw it in three dimensions instead.

Earth sits in the middle. Each planet is placed in the exact direction you'd have seen it, including how far above or below the Sun's path it was, and at its true distance from Earth. Those distances run from about 400,000 kilometres for the Moon to more than five billion for Pluto, so we squeeze them onto a gentler scale that keeps the order right and lets everything fit on one screen. The zodiac signs hang around the outside, where the planets line up against them.

The result is something a flat chart can't show you: which planets were bunched together on one side of the sky, which were behind the Sun, and how far out the slow ones were.

What you'll see

• Your Sun, Moon and planets, in their real positions for your birth moment, right out to Pluto, plus the North Node and Lilith.
• Your rising sign and houses, if you know your birth time, drawn as lines from Earth out across the zodiac.
• The traditional chart wheel, a tap away, for anyone who reads charts the usual way.
• Every placement written out by sign, degree and house.

Then, if you'd like, a reading written for your chart: three or four plain paragraphs about who it describes, not a horoscope.

How accurate is it?

The positions are worked out from DE440, the planetary data NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory publishes for astronomers and spacecraft navigation, using the same astronomical models as professional astrology software. We test them against the Swiss Ephemeris, the engine most astrology software is built on, and against Astro.com, and they agree to a tiny fraction of an arcsecond. Time zones are worked out from the place you were born and the rules in force on that date, including daylight saving. For births before standard time zones existed, roughly before 1900 in most places, we flag that the time is approximate.

If you don't know your birth time

You still get your sky. Everything except the Moon barely moves in a day, so the planets will be right. We'll mark the Moon as approximate and leave out the rising sign and houses rather than guess. There's more on that here.

See your birth sky

Questions