Transits
What the sky is doing to your chart
Where the planets are now against where they were when you were born. This is the technique a horoscope approximates: given a birth time it uses your actual houses rather than counting from your Sun sign, and every date is the exact moment the aspect perfects.
How this works
What a transit is
Your birth chart is a snapshot and it never changes. The sky does. A transit is a planet moving into an exact angle with something in that snapshot: Saturn arriving at the degree your Sun occupies, or Jupiter reaching the point 120 degrees from your Moon.
That is why transits are dated and horoscopes are not. There is one moment when the angle is exact, and it can be calculated to the minute for any year you like.
Why some happen three times
A slow planet crosses the point, turns retrograde and passes back over it, then turns direct and crosses a third time. It can take most of a year. The tradition treats that as one episode with three peaks rather than three separate events, and the readings above are grouped that way rather than listing the same transit three times.
What the birth time changes
Not the dates. Those come from your birth date and are the same either way. It changes the houses, which is to say the area of life a transit lands in, and there is no way to work that out without one.
Every Sun-sign horoscope on the internet, including the ones on this site, gets around that by counting houses from your Sun sign. It is a real technique and it is an approximation. Where no birth time is given here, the houses are withheld rather than approximated, because presenting the substitute as the real thing is how a tool stops being worth trusting.
The rest of the picture
A transit list is most useful beside the chart it is transiting. All of these are free and computed from the same ephemeris.
Questions about transits
The four that come up most.
The angle a planet makes today to where a planet was at your birth. Your natal chart is a fixed snapshot; the sky keeps moving, and a transit is the moving sky making an aspect to the fixed one.
When Saturn comes back to the degree it occupied at your birth, which takes about 29 and a half years. The first falls between roughly 28 and 31, the second around 58 to 60. This calculator finds the exact dates, including the repeat passes if Saturn crosses the point more than once.
Because the planet turns retrograde in between. It crosses the point going forward, appears to reverse back over it, then crosses again. The tradition reads that as one extended episode with three peaks rather than three separate events.
Not for the dates, which depend only on your birth date. You need it for the houses: which area of life a transit lands in cannot be worked out without one, and this calculator withholds the houses rather than guessing.