△ Trine
Sun trine Moon
What you want and what you need agree. Associated with an unforced sense of self and, in the tradition, with a comparatively settled early home life.
- Angle
- 120°
- Orb used
- ±5°
- Type
- Soft
- Bodies
- ☉ ☽
What these two are about together
The two lights, and the oldest question in a chart: whether what you are becoming and what you actually need are pulling in the same direction. Every tradition treats this pair as the most important relationship in a birth chart.
What a trine does
A trine puts two planets in the same element, and the tradition reads it as the easiest relationship in the chart. What the two govern agree with each other and need no negotiating. It is usually experienced as a natural facility, which is exactly why it is also the aspect most often taken for granted.
How it reads
What you want and what you need agree. Associated with an unforced sense of self and, in the tradition, with a comparatively settled early home life.
In practice
Read as ability rather than luck. Trines describe what somebody can do without effort, and consequently what they may never have bothered to develop.
What to watch for
Complacency. The traditional caution about trines is that nothing here demands anything, so nothing here necessarily grows.
The two planets
Sun: Identity, vitality and what you are becoming
Moon: Need, instinct and what settles you
Famous charts with sun trine moon
808 of the 13,000 documented charts on this site have it. The 24 best known are below. Every one is computed from that figure’s own birth data, with the source of the birth time stated on their page.
- Grace KellyActress & Princess of Monaco · 2.28° orb
- Alan RickmanActor · 1.7° orb · approximate
- Betty WhiteActress & comedian · 2.47° orb · approximate
- Whitney HoustonSinger & actress · 0.39° orb
- Marie CuriePhysicist and chemist · 1.9° orb · approximate
- Rosalind FranklinChemist and X-ray crystallographer · 0.44° orb · approximate
- Johnny CashSinger and songwriter · 3.72° orb · approximate
- Roald AmundsenPolar explorer · 2.98° orb · approximate
- Louis ArmstrongTrumpeter and singer · 4.11° orb · approximate
- Terry PratchettAuthor · 0.47° orb · approximate
- Rembrandt van RijnPainter · 0.05° orb · approximate
- Andy WarholArtist · 3.1° orb · approximate
- Jonas SalkVirologist · 2.11° orb · approximate
- Katherine JohnsonMathematician · 1.89° orb · approximate
- George HarrisonMusician and songwriter · 0.96° orb · approximate
- Tom PettyMusician and songwriter · 1.18° orb · approximate
- Boris PasternakPoet & novelist · 0.8° orb · approximate
- Arthur Conan DoyleNovelist & physician · 3.32° orb · approximate
- Samuel BeckettPlaywright & novelist · 0.41° orb · approximate
- Herman MelvilleNovelist · 1.01° orb · approximate
- John SteinbeckNovelist · 1.69° orb · approximate
- Arthur MillerPlaywright · 3.02° orb · approximate
- Stephen Jay GouldPalaeontologist & essayist · 4.38° orb · approximate
- Maurice WilkinsBiophysicist · 0.03° orb · approximate
22 of these are marked approximate: the figure has a birth date and no birth time, and the Moon moves far enough in a day that the hour could change whether the aspect holds. The rest do not depend on the hour at all.
Sun and Moon at other angles
- Sun conjunction MoonTwo bodies at the same degree, acting as one
- Sun semi-sextile MoonThirty degrees apart: neighbouring signs, with little in common
- Sun semi-square MoonForty-five degrees apart: half a square, and read as half its weight
- Sun sextile MoonSixty degrees apart: cooperation that has to be taken up
- Sun quintile MoonSeventy-two degrees apart: a fifth of the circle, and the odd one out
- Sun square MoonNinety degrees apart: two things that will not sit still together
- Sun sesquiquadrate MoonA hundred and thirty-five degrees: a square and a half
- Sun quincunx MoonA hundred and fifty degrees apart: two things that cannot be compared
- Sun opposition MoonDirectly across the chart: two ends of one axis
Sun and Moon also have a midpoint: the halfway point between them, read as a third place in the chart rather than as an angle between two.
Find this in your own chart
A reading like this only tells you what the pairing is associated with. Whether Sun and Moon actually make this angle in your chart depends on your birth date, time and place.
