Planets › Moon

☽︎ Moon

Instinct and feeling.

The fastest mover, circling the zodiac in under a month. The Moon governs instinct, mood, and the private inner weather.

Right now

Drag it on the live clock to travel through time.

Current aspects

When the Moon and Jupiter meet at the same point of the wheel, tenderness and memory fuses with faith and generosity, for better and for worse.

In the traditional scheme the Moon carries emotion, habit, and the need to belong. It feels its way wherever there is instinct, mood, and the need for safety; what it offers is tenderness and memory, what it looks for is shelter, and its failure mode is moodiness.

The Moon spends about two and a half days in each sign, the whole zodiac in under a month. It never turns retrograde; it is simply the fastest thing on the wheel.

Read well, the Moon shows as a nourishing, honest emotional instinct. Read badly, it slides toward moods that rule the day.

Moon phase

The phase is simply how far the Moon has moved ahead of the Sun around the zodiac. At the new moon the two sit together and the disc is dark; a quarter turn later the Moon is half lit; opposite the Sun it is full. The percentage above is the illuminated fraction, computed from the real geometry, not an approximation.

The full cycle from one new moon to the next runs about twenty-nine and a half days, the synodic month. Because that is slightly longer than the Moon’s roughly twenty-seven-day loop through the twelve signs, the phase and the sign drift apart over the year rather than repeating in lockstep, so a full moon in one sign will fall in a different sign next month.

How long does a void-of-course Moon last?

The Moon is called void of course from the moment it makes its last major aspect (conjunction, sextile, square, trine, or opposition) to one of the ten bodies, Sun through Pluto, until it crosses into the next sign. Traditionally it is a fallow stretch: a poor time to start something you want to stick, a fine time to rest, finish, or let things settle. Starcharts uses the modern ten-body set, and every time shown is UTC.

There is no fixed length. Because the Moon can make its last aspect early or late in a sign, a void period can run minutes or run most of a day; the calendar below lists the actual computed windows for the next thirty days rather than a rule of thumb.

Void-of-course periods, next 30 days

Each period runs from the Moon’s last major aspect until it enters the next sign (UTC).

Waxing vs waning

Waxing means the illuminated fraction is growing, from new toward full; waning means it is shrinking, from full back toward new. Tradition reads the waxing half as a building, planting phase and the waning half as a releasing, finishing one, though this, like the rest of the page, is interpretation rather than a claim about outcomes.

Dignities

Moon traditionally rules Cancer. It is exalted in Taurus, its strongest placement by tradition.

Moon in each sign

• ♈︎ Aries
• ♉︎ Taurus
• ♊︎ Gemini
• ♋︎ Cancer
• ♌︎ Leo
• ♍︎ Virgo
• ♎︎ Libra
• ♏︎ Scorpio
• ♐︎ Sagittarius
• ♑︎ Capricorn
• ♒︎ Aquarius
• ♓︎ Pisces

Tradition and interpretation, not prediction. All planets & points.