Solar Return · year chart · Solar Arc · directions
How the Solar Return works
Once a year the Sun returns to its natal degree, near your birthday. Asteria casts a chart for that exact moment and layers it over your natal wheel.
The return Ascendant is how you meet the year: the face, the body-tone, the way the chapter greets you. The return Sun's house is where vitality and focus pool for twelve months. The return Moon is the emotional current underneath those two.
The house-overlay table shows which natal houses this year's return planets activate. The return-to-natal aspects name which birth stories the year reopens, tightest first.
Solar Return is the weather of the year. Solar Arc (the other tab on this hub) is the architecture of turning-points. They share a word and almost nothing else.
The year's chart
January 20 to February 18. Fixed air. Ruled by Uranus. Co-ruled traditionally by Saturn. It sets the tone the year is met through.
Death. Sex. Other people's money. The merging. The transformation. This is where the year's vitality and focus concentrate.
The emotional current of the year: what will need tending and where the feeling-life is drawn.
House overlay
Where each return planet falls in your natal houses: the areas of life this year's chart switches on.
| Return planet | Lands in natal |
|---|---|
| Sun | 10th house |
| Moon | 4th house |
| Mercury | 11th house |
| Venus | 11th house |
| Mars | 8th house |
| Jupiter | 9th house |
| Saturn | 4th house |
| Uranus | 7th house |
| Neptune | 4th house |
| Pluto | 2nd house |
Return-to-natal aspects
Every aspect the return chart makes back to your birth chart, tightest first.
| Natal | Aspect | Return | Orb |
|---|---|---|---|
| Natal Sun | conjunction | Return Sun | 0.00° |
| Natal Mars | sextile | Return Uranus | 0.08° |
| Natal Mars | conjunction | Return Moon | 0.11° |
| Natal Neptune | sextile | Return Venus | 0.28° |
| Natal Jupiter | sextile | Return Moon | 0.35° |
| Natal Jupiter | conjunction | Return Uranus | 0.53° |
| Natal Sun | trine | Return Pluto | 0.62° |
| Natal Sun | opposition | Return Neptune | 0.80° |
| Natal Saturn | sextile | Return Mercury | 1.50° |
| Natal Neptune | square | Return Moon | 1.66° |
| Natal Mercury | conjunction | Return Mercury | 1.76° |
| Natal Sun | trine | Return Uranus | 1.81° |
| Natal Mars | opposition | Return Sun | 1.89° |
| Natal Sun | opposition | Return Moon | 2.00° |
| Natal Venus | conjunction | Return Jupiter | 2.17° |
| Natal Uranus | sextile | Return Mercury | 2.21° |
| Natal Jupiter | trine | Return Sun | 2.35° |
| Natal Mercury | square | Return Mars | 2.47° |
| Natal Mars | sextile | Return Pluto | 2.51° |
| Natal Mars | conjunction | Return Neptune | 2.69° |
| Natal Moon | trine | Return Jupiter | 2.79° |
| Natal Jupiter | trine | Return Pluto | 2.97° |
| Natal Jupiter | sextile | Return Neptune | 3.15° |
| Natal Pluto | conjunction | Return Venus | 3.30° |
| Natal Neptune | square | Return Sun | 3.66° |
| Natal Moon | conjunction | Return Saturn | 4.15° |
| Natal Neptune | square | Return Saturn | 4.46° |
| Natal Neptune | square | Return Neptune | 4.46° |