A transit is a planet, where it stands today, forming an angle with a point in your birth chart. Two layers, and this is where almost everyone gets lost: the birth chart is a still photograph, the sky at the instant you were born, and it never changes again. The sky, on the other hand, kept moving.

When Saturn, moving along in 2026, reaches the exact degree where your Sun stood on the day you were born, that is Saturn transiting your natal Sun. The photograph stands still; what moves is today's sky, and the meeting between the two is what gets read.

It is worth saying what a transit cannot is, because the confusion costs money: "Mercury retrograde" or "Moon in Pisces today" are news from the sky, the same for eight billion people. A transit is that sky meeting your chart, and that is why it depends on the date, time and city of your birth.

Here is the part nobody publishes, and it changes how you should use the word. I took 300 charts of people born between 1950 and 2010 and swept through 2026 day by day, with the same ephemeris that builds charts on this site, asking: on how many days does this person have at least one exact transit?

Exact means an orb of one degree, the tight contact, the way this site's engine counts it, from one of the five slow planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) to one of the five personal points.

In other words: "I'm in a Saturn transit" is almost always true about something. Saying that tells you nothing, the same way saying "I have a planet in a sign in my chart" tells you nothing. The question that actually informs has three parts: which planet, touching which which point of your chart, and in which house it lands.

A transit is not one day. It opens when the planet enters the orb, goes exact, and closes when it leaves, and the slower the planet, the longer it takes to cross that stretch of sky. Measured across the same 300 charts, with an orb of one degree:

A Jupiter transit stays exact for 10 days, and 5.4 of them open per year; a Saturn one, for 20 days, with 3.0 per year; a Uranus one, for 46 days, with 1.4 per year; a Neptune one, for 62 days, with 1.0 per year; and a Pluto one, for 75 days, with 0.7 per year.

These numbers are each planet's speed, translated into days. Jupiter goes round the zodiac in twelve years and Pluto takes 248, so the same stretch of sky that Jupiter crosses in ten days holds Pluto for two and a half months. That is why a Jupiter transit passes like a good week, and a Pluto transit describes an entire season of life.

And there is what these numbers still do not count: retrogradation. When the planet turns retrograde retrograde right after a contact, it comes back, touches again, and then touches a third time moving forward. The same transit happens three times, and from the first to the last touch nine months can pass. It is the shape of Saturn return, which happens in three touches for 38% of people.

A transit is not just the planet "landing on top of" the point. The same angles that count in a aspect of the birth chart count here too, and each one has its own character:

• Conjunction, 0°. The planet reaches the same degree. It is the strongest contact and the hardest to ignore, that planet's subject walks in through the front door.
• Opposition, 180°. On the other side of the chart. It tends to show up as someone or something from outside embodying the pressure.
• Square, 90°. The angle of friction that forces a decision. It is the one that shows up most in a change of course.
• Trine, 120°, and sextile, 60°. The easy ones. They open a door and force nothing, and that is why they go unnoticed by anyone who was not paying attention.

This site also counts the quincunx, at 150°, and the semi-sextile, at 30°, with much tighter orbs. The slower the body, the smaller the orb: it is the rule that stops a Pluto transit from feeling endless because of a loose count.

Transit, progression and solar return all answer "what's coming", and they are different things. It is worth telling them apart, because whoever buys one thinking it is another ends up frustrated, and rightly so.

• Transit: the real sky of today, used to date what is happening now.
• Progression: a symbolic calculation in which one day equals one year, used to read inner maturing, which is slow.
• Solar return: the chart of your astrological birthday, used to read the theme of the year that is beginning.

The transit is the only one of the three that is real sky: you can point a telescope and see the planet right there. The other two are constructs, good ones, old ones, useful ones, and constructs all the same.

A transit does not tell you the event. The same Saturn transit to house 10 can describe a promotion that costs you dearly, a dismissal that had already been brewing, or the decision to walk away from a career, and all three fit the same astrological sentence. What the reading gives you is the quality of the period and the area where it hits, with dates attached.

Three limits worth saying out loud:

• A transit is not fate. It describes the climate; you are the one who acts, and almost everything that decides the outcome sits outside the chart, what you have already built, who stands beside you, what you choose to do with the pressure.
• There is no such thing as a good transit or a bad transit. There is an easy transit and a demanding one. The easy one tends to leave no mark; the demanding one is what people are still telling stories about ten years later.
• The date is not the eve. Since the contact can come back three times, the whole period is what matters, not the day of the peak.

And the limit of this practice: astrology does not decide for anyone, does not replace conversation or therapy, and does not predict what will happen. It gives you vocabulary and a calendar.

And the questions that come up most on this subject, with the short answer: