Free birth chart · No account
Paper, size and framing.
A 5 × 7 card, printed with the chart: the sun, moon and rising sign in plain words, with the moon phase and the details of the birth. Written to still ring true years from now.
A birth chart is a map of where the sun, moon and planets stood at the moment someone was born, seen from the place they were born. Astrologers also call it a natal chart. It is drawn as a circle divided into twelve zodiac signs and twelve houses, and it describes a disposition rather than a destiny.
A birth chart is calculated once, for one minute of one day, and never changes. A newspaper horoscope is written for everyone who shares a sun sign, about one twelfth of the world.
The sun sign is the sign the sun stood in, and a date alone will tell you that. The moon sign is where the moon was, and the moon covers about thirteen degrees a day. The rising sign, or ascendant, is the sign coming up over the eastern horizon at that exact minute, and it changes every couple of hours.
Enter the date, time and place of birth at hourandsky.com and the chart is drawn immediately, free and without an account. The place matters as much as the time, because it sets both the time zone the birth is converted from and the horizon the rising sign is measured against.
No, but it changes what can be shown. The sun and the planets are accurate to the day. The rising sign and the houses move with the clock, so they need the time, and the chart leaves them off rather than guessing. On average the ascendant advances one degree every four minutes.
Positions come from the Swiss Ephemeris, which is derived from the planetary and lunar ephemerides published by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and agrees with them to a thousandth of an arcsecond. Those are the same tables used to navigate spacecraft. The chart covers births from 13000 BC to AD 16800.
Houses divide a chart into twelve segments. Placidus is the method most Western astrologers use, named for Placido de Titi, an Italian monk who became professor of mathematics at Pavia and died in 1668. It divides time rather than space: it takes the hours a degree needs to climb from the horizon to overhead and cuts them in three.
Because it fixes both the clock and the horizon. Without a place there is no time zone to convert the birth time from, and no eastern horizon for a sign to rise over. A birth in Mexico City and the same hour in New York give different rising signs and different houses.
No, and this shop will not pretend otherwise. Controlled studies have not shown that astrologers predict anything better than chance, and a meta-analysis of more than forty of them found an effect indistinguishable from zero. One study checked the twelve signs directly against the health records of ten million people and found nothing that held up. What is exact is the astronomy. The sky really was in that arrangement over that city at that minute, and that is what the print records.
A few things, though not the ones astrology names, and the effects are small. Month of birth turns up in some health statistics, and it depends on which hemisphere you were born in. The lifespan pattern found in Europe shifts by six months in Australia, while Britons who emigrated there kept the European one. That points at daylight and infection during pregnancy rather than at the sky. The largest thing a birth date predicts is administrative: a child born the week after a school cutoff is nearly a year older than one born the week before, and stays ahead for years.
Babylonian scribes were writing down celestial omens by about 1800 BC. The twelve equal signs of the zodiac were standardized in Babylonia around 400 BC, and the oldest surviving chart cast for one person's birth is a clay tablet for a birth in January 410 BC. It is one of the longest continuous record-keeping habits humans have.
Babylonian astronomers, who divided the sun's apparent yearly path into twelve equal segments of thirty degrees. Greek astrologers in Ptolemaic Egypt later added the rising sign and the houses, which is what turned a list of planetary positions into a chart of one particular person's birth.
For most of history it was the same job. Johannes Kepler, who worked out that planets travel in ellipses, was Imperial Mathematician in Prague and left roughly eight hundred people's horoscopes in his papers. Galileo cast charts for his own daughters and taught chart calculation to medical students at Padua.
One assignment in 1930. The Sunday Express wanted something written about the newborn Princess Margaret and the job fell to an assistant astrologer, R. H. Naylor. It ran that August. A lucky prediction about an airship a few weeks later won him a weekly column, and by 1937 he had settled on the twelve sun sign format every paper still runs.
About a quarter of American adults. Pew Research Center found in 2024 that 27 percent say they believe in astrology and 28 percent consult it at least once a year. Twice as many say they do it for fun as for insight, and 1 percent rely on it for major decisions.
Every print ships with a 5 by 7 reading card that names the sun, moon and rising sign in plain words, with the moon phase and the details of the birth. Prints run from $36, framed to $159, with free shipping in the US.