Find Your
Chiron Sign

Chiron is a small icy body, number 2060 in the catalog of minor planets, that orbits the Sun between Saturn and Uranus. In astrology it stands for the wounded healer: a lasting sore spot in one area of life, and the ability to help other people with the same trouble.

This calculator finds Chiron's sign and degree at your birth, the whole-sign house it falls in, whether it was retrograde, and its major aspects to the planets and points in your chart. It then shows the reading for that sign and house.

Charles Kowal identified Chiron on November 1, 1977, on photographic plates taken at Palomar Observatory on October 18. It was the first known centaur, a class of small bodies whose orbits cross those of the giant planets. A faint coma was seen around it in 1989, so it is also catalogued as comet 95P/Chiron, and searches of older plates have found it on images from as early as 1895.

That reading comes from the myth of the centaur Chiron, a healer whose own wound would not close, and from astrologers who wrote about the new body after 1977. The sources are listed further down this page.

The calculator sends your birth date, time and place to the chart server. The server converts your local time to UTC using the time-zone rules in force at that date and place, then asks its ephemeris for Chiron's position, with the same calculation it uses for the planets. The answer is Chiron's geocentric, apparent longitude in the tropical zodiac: where it stood as seen from Earth at the moment of birth, measured from the March equinox.

The server's ephemeris covers Chiron from 1800 to 2399. Outside that range the planets fall back to a less precise built-in model, but Chiron has none, so for a birth before 1800 or after 2399 the calculator returns an error instead of a position. The ephemeris and its accuracy are set out on the methodology page.

• Sign and degree. The longitude is divided into twelve 30° signs and shown to the arcminute.
• Retrograde. Flagged when Chiron's daily motion in longitude is negative at the birth time.
• House. Whole Sign houses: the sign on the Ascendant is the 1st house, the next sign the 2nd, and so on. Chiron's house is the count of signs from your rising sign to Chiron's sign.
• Aspects. The server measures aspects by degree, not by sign, with orbs scaled for each pair; Chiron takes the tightest multiplier, 0.6. The calculator then shows major aspects (conjunction, opposition, trine, square, sextile) within 5°, tightest first, up to six.

Why Chiron's Time in a Sign Varies

Chiron's orbit is long and stretched, with an eccentricity of about 0.38. At perihelion it comes within 8.4 to 8.5 AU of the Sun, inside Saturn's orbit (9.0 to 10.1 AU); at aphelion it reaches 18.8 to 18.9 AU, close to Uranus (18.3 to 20.1 AU). One orbit takes about 50 years. NASA JPL's Small-Body Database gives 50.6 years, and in our ephemeris perihelion falls in 1895, 1945, 1996 and 2046, about 50.5 years apart.

Like any orbiting body, Chiron moves fastest at perihelion and slowest at aphelion. Its perihelion lies at about 8° to 10° Libra in heliocentric longitude, so as seen from Earth it crosses Libra in 2.0 years and spends 8.8 years in Pisces and 9.0 years in Aries, on the far side of the orbit. The interval between perihelia is not fixed either: over the six centuries the ephemeris covers it ranges from 47.7 to 50.5 years, because Saturn and Uranus keep altering the orbit.

To find your Chiron sign by birth date, look for the row whose dates include your birthday. Each year Chiron moves backward for 128 to 157 days, so near a sign change it can cross the same boundary three times. Those back-and-forth spells are listed in the last column: if your birthday falls in one, the sign named there is your Chiron sign.

Dates are in UTC. If you were born within a day of a change, enter your birth time in the calculator above, which works from the exact moment.

The myth. Chiron, son of Cronus and the nymph Philyra, was the centaur who raised and taught Asclepius, Achilles and Jason. In Apollodorus's Library (2.5.4), an arrow Heracles fired at the other centaurs struck Chiron in the knee. Heracles' arrows carried the Hydra's poison, and the wound would not heal; Chiron wanted to die but was immortal, until Prometheus offered to take on his immortality. Ovid's Fasti (5.379–414) has Chiron drop one of the arrows on his own foot and fail to cure it with his herbs, and ends with him placed among the stars as the constellation Centaurus.

The name. Kowal named the new object after the centaur, and later centaurs follow the same convention. The phrase “wounded healer” comes from Carl Jung, who used it for the analyst whose own wounds shape the work with patients, and who referred to the Chiron myth. The classicist Karl Kerényi discussed Chiron's incurable wound in Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician's Existence (1959).

The astrology. After 1977, astrologers built Chiron's meanings from those sources. Barbara Hand Clow's Chiron: Rainbow Bridge Between the Inner and Outer Planets (Llewellyn, 1987) and Melanie Reinhart's Chiron and the Healing Journey (Arkana, 1989) set out the sign, house and aspect meanings that the readings on this page build on.

The positions and dates on this page are astronomy and can be checked against any ephemeris. The meanings are an interpretive tradition, not measured effects.

Chiron is named for the centaur of Greek myth, the son of Cronus and Philyra who taught medicine to Asclepius and was struck by an arrow of Heracles tipped with the Hydra’s poison. The wound never closed, and in the telling Apollodorus gave, the centaur gave up his immortality to be free of it. Twentieth-century writers called him the wounded healer, and the phrase passed to the minor planet that carries his name.

Minor planet 2060 Chiron was found in 1977 by Charles Kowal at Palomar, so it has no place in Ptolemy, Lilly or Culpeper, whose lists of the planets and the parts of the body end at Saturn. The astrologers who took it up in the decades after it was found read it in the sixth house, and in aspect to the Sun and Moon, as a theme of care and mending in a life, and they drew that reading from the myth rather than from any older text. The reading was theirs. The seventeenth-century physicians who cast decumbitures never saw the object and wrote nothing about it.

The medical pages on this site count Chiron as a modern addition that stands outside the texts they describe. Those pages report what Manilius, Ptolemy, Lilly and Culpeper assigned, in the past tense and with the source named, and Chiron appears in none of their lists. The calculator above places Chiron by sign and house and says nothing about anyone’s body. The medical astrology hub gathers the Zodiac Man, the planets, the sixth house and the four temperaments as the tradition had them, and sets this object at the edge of that tradition as what it is, a reading of the late twentieth century.

The medical astrology hub collects the family’s pages.