Sky Guide
A little language for looking up.
A simple terminology library for the words you may meet across Lantern & Sky.
Open a term for the full guideAscendant-Rising Sign
The Ascendant, also called the Rising Sign, is the zodiac sign rising on the eastern horizon at the moment you were born.
Aspects
Every birth chart has planets scattered across the sky at the moment you were born — and an aspect is simply the relationship between any two of them, based on how far apart they sit. Picture the planets as points on a circle: the distance between any two points forms an angle, and depending on what that angle is, astrologers read the relationship as easy, tense, or somewhere in between.
Birth Chart/Natal Chart
A birth chart, also called a natal chart, is a snapshot that captures the sky exactly as it looked — Sun, Moon, and every planet — at the exact time and place you were born.
Constellation
A constellation is a recognized pattern of stars. Modern astronomy officially recognizes 88 constellations covering the entire sky.
Ecliptic
The ecliptic is the apparent path the Sun follows across the sky over the course of a year. The Moon and most of the planets stay close to this path
Equinox
The equinoxes occur twice each year, when day and night are nearly equal in length around the world.
House
Picture your birth chart as a stage divided into twelve scenes, each one set in a different part of your life — home, work, relationships, creativity, and so on. A house is one of those scenes. Every planet in your chart lands in one of them, and wherever it lands tells you where in your life that planet's energy tends to show up.
Moon Phase
Moon phases describe the changing appearance of the Moon as it orbits Earth, from New Moon to Full Moon and back again.
Planet
In astronomy, planets are large worlds that orbit the Sun. In astrology, the Sun and Moon are traditionally grouped with the planets because they are among the primary bodies moving across our sky. The Sun and Moon are also known as the luminaries, a term that sets them apart from the other planets.
Retrograde
Picture standing at a train platform as a slower train pulls away beside yours. For a moment, it looks like that train is moving backward — even though it's still rolling forward the whole time. That's essentially what's happening when astrologers say a planet is "in retrograde." From our vantage point on Earth, a planet can appear to slow down, stop, and drift backward across the sky. It isn't actually reversing course. It's a trick of perspective, caused by the difference in speed between Earth and the planet we're watching.
Solstice
The solstices are the two days each year when daylight reaches its longest or shortest point.
Transit
A transit happens when a planet's movement today creates a new relationship to where the planets stood at your birth.
Zodiac
The band of sky divided into twelve equal sections that astrology uses to track the apparent movement of the Sun, Moon, and planets.
Zodiac Sign
A zodiac sign is one of twelve equal 30-degree sections of the zodiac, such as Leo, Virgo, or Aquarius.