Station

Meaning

A station is the turning point of a planet’s apparent motion: the days when, seen from the Earth, it slows to a halt in the zodiac before going the other way. A planet makes two in each cycle, turning retrograde at the first and direct again at the second, often called its stationary retrograde and stationary direct points.

Astrologers read the days around a station as the strongest of the planet’s cycle. The planet lingers on one degree, and whatever it touches there in a chart is felt for longer and more clearly than when it passes at speed. A station is not something anyone sees happen in the sky: it is a slowing that the eye notices only over weeks.

In practice

Each retrograde brings two: Mercury makes six to eight stations a year, Venus two every nineteen months or so, Mars two every twenty-six months, and Jupiter, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto about two a year.

A station within a degree of a planet or an angle of a birth chart is among the transits astrologers watch most closely, all the more when the planet will cross that degree again as it moves on.

A planet born within a few days of its station is often read as strong and insistent in that chart, its qualities pressing to be lived.

Origin and history

Ptolemy’s Almagest, about 150, works out where each planet stations, with a theorem it credits to Apollonius of Perga: in its model the station falls where the planet’s motion on its epicycle exactly cancels the epicycle’s motion along the larger circle. With the Sun at the centre, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 1543, made the stations the moments when the planet’s motion relative to the moving Earth points straight along the line of sight, so that its direction in the sky stops changing.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune counts a planet as stationary while its speed along the zodiac stays below the speed it has a few days from a station: one day for Mercury, three for Venus and Mars, five for Jupiter and Saturn, seven for Chiron, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Each limit is the median speed at that distance over every station from 1900 to 2050 in the Swiss Ephemeris.

The calendar finds the moment of each station by following the planet’s speed every twelve hours and halving the interval where it changes sign, down to half a second.