TRANSITS AND ORBS
Your natal chart is frozen at the minute of your birth. The sky is not. Since you were born the planets have kept moving, and a transit is what happens when one of them, where it is right now, makes an aspect to where a planet stood in your birth chart. It is how astrology marks the seasons of a life.
Fast planets, slow planets
Each planet keeps its own clock. The Sun rounds the zodiac once a year, so it makes a big transit to itself about every three months: a conjunction on your birthday (your solar return), a square three months later, an opposition at the half-year.
Saturn takes about twenty-nine years to return to where it began, which is why the much-discussed Saturn return lands near ages twenty-nine, fifty-eight, and eighty-seven, each one a reckoning with responsibility. Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto move slower still; their transits are rare enough to mark whole chapters, not seasons.
The orb
A transit is rarely exact to the degree, and it would be useless if it only counted at the precise instant. An orb is the buffer around an angle: the margin within which we still call it an aspect. Astra Antiqua runs one documented orb table everywhere on this site, natal, transit, and synastry alike. Nothing is estimated and nothing is widened to manufacture a reading; when nothing sits inside these margins, the day is quiet.
The closer a transit is to exact, the louder it is meant to read.
Transits run through the whole app
Your daily reading is built from the transits touching your chart today. The long transits and the year-ahead forecast track every major transit, eclipse, retrograde, and your solar return for the next twelve months, each timed to the day.