Transit window

Meaning

A slow planet moves so little each day that it stays near an exact aspect for a long time. Ulune calls that stretch the transit window: the weeks or months a slow planet spends within 1° of an exact aspect to a point of your chart.

The window is often longer than one pass. Seen from the Earth, every planet seems at times to stop, walk backwards, then stop again and go forward; from Jupiter outwards, this happens about once a year. A retrograde that happens near a natal point carries the planet over it three times: once going forward, once going back, once going forward again. A single window can therefore hold two or three exact moments, sometimes spread over more than a year for Uranus, Neptune or Pluto.

Sometimes a planet comes within 1° and turns back at its station before it reaches exact. That is a near miss: a theme that approaches without quite landing. It still counts as a period, read more softly, like a question raised and left open.

Tradition reads the whole window as the time a slow transit is active. The exact dates are its peaks, not its edges. Many astrologers notice the theme of a slow transit before the first exact pass, and its effects often settle only after the last.

In practice

• Three passes: Saturn square your natal Sun may be exact in March, again in August while retrograde, and a last time in December. Tradition reads the first pass as the theme arriving, the second as a review, and the third as its resolution.
• A long stay: Neptune or Pluto can keep a window open for well over a year. It is read less as an event than as a slow change of climate in the area of life the natal point describes.
• A station on a point: a planet that turns direct or retrograde within a few arcminutes of a natal point keeps it company for many weeks. Such stations are often read as the most marked transits of a year.
• Planning: a window shows when a slow theme is in the air. A quieter day inside it can be a good moment to reflect, and the exact dates good moments to act or to mark a step.

Across traditions

• Medieval astrology, as William Lilly still set it out in 1647, gave orbs to the planets themselves rather than to the aspects, each body with a reach of its own. The 1° window is a modern, tighter habit that many astrologers keep for slow transits.
• Indian astrology reads a slow planet’s transit by sign: Saturn’s stay in a sign, about two and a half years, is itself the period.

How Ulune calculates it

• Ulune draws windows for the slow bodies: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Chiron and the North Node. They are aimed at the natal planets, Chiron, the nodes, Lilith and the angles, by the five major aspects.
• The Ascendant and the Descendant count as one axis, and so do the Midheaven and the IC, and the two nodes. A window to one is shown once, under the Ascendant, the Midheaven or the North Node.
• The positions come from year files of daily positions, the same for everyone and asked for by date, so your chart stays on your device. Where the window starts and ends is placed between two days by the line through their orbs.
• Each exact pass inside a window is found to the second, as for any exact moment. When there is none, the window is a near miss, and Ulune keeps the closest the planet came.
• A window that was already open on the first day of the files, or still is on the last, is marked open at that end.
• In the calendar, a bar spans the time within 1° and a tick marks each exact pass.