Horoscopes by sign

How our horoscopes work

Our horoscopes start with the real sky. For every day we work out where the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn actually are, using published astronomy formulas from Jean Meeus and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The math is good to well under a degree, which is plenty for signs, moon phases and retrogrades.

The Moon leads, because it moves into a new sign every two or three days. We count which house it's visiting from your Sun sign: if you're a Leo and the Moon is in Libra, it's in your 3rd house, the house of messages. Each of the 12 houses covers a part of life, like money, home, romance or career, and that sets the theme for your day.

Then we check the rest of the sky. We look at the Moon's phase, whether Mercury, Venus or Mars is retrograde (seeming to drift backward from where we stand on Earth), and whether a planet is making a strong angle to your Sun, which astrologers call an aspect. We wrote lines for each of those situations ahead of time, and your reading is built from them, plus a bit of advice and a line for your sign's element.

No AI writes your horoscope on the fly. On these sign pages the picks are seeded by the date and your sign, so everyone with your sign reading the same sky gets the same lines. The sky keeps moving, though, so if the Moon changes signs partway through the day, the reading changes with it. Your own daily reading in the app is shuffled just for you, and once you add your birthday it measures aspects from your exact Sun and leans toward the topics you tell us you like. It's all for fun and reflection, but the sky behind it is real.