Find Your
North Node

The North Node is the point where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic, the Sun's yearly path through the zodiac, with the Moon heading north. The South Node is the crossing on the other side, where the Moon heads south. Neither is a physical body, but both can be measured, and astrologers read them as a pair: the North Node's sign and house describe what a person is asked to develop, the South Node's what comes easily and gets relied on too much.

In astronomy the nodes matter because of eclipses. The Moon's orbit is tilted about 5° to the ecliptic, so most new and full Moons pass above or below the Sun or the Earth's shadow. An eclipse needs the new or full Moon to fall near a node. Of the 452 solar eclipses from 1900 to 2100, every one happens with the Sun within 17.2° of a node, and every one of the 457 lunar eclipses (penumbral ones included) with the Moon within 17.3° of one. That link is why older traditions named the nodes after an eclipse-swallowing dragon or demon, as the sources section below explains.

This calculator returns the true North Node's sign and degree at your birth; its house, in whole-sign houses, which needs your birth time and place; the South Node at the same degree of the opposite sign and house; whether the node was moving backward; and up to six major aspects the node makes to your planets within 5°. Each result comes with a reading for the sign, the house and the aspects.

In most modern readings the South Node is not a bad placement: its sign describes real abilities, and the usual advice is to keep using them while putting more effort into the North Node's sign and house.

The calculator asks TropicalAstro's chart server for a natal chart in whole-sign houses and reads the North Node from it. The server computes the true (osculating) node from its ephemeris, in the tropical zodiac. The South Node is not calculated separately. The ephemeris, its date range and the other conventions are set out on the methodology page.

True Node or Mean Node

The mean node is an average. It moves backward at a steady 19.34° a year, completes the circle in 18.61 years and spends exactly 566.5 days, about 18.6 months, in every sign. The true node is the node of the Moon's actual orbit at that instant, which the Sun's pull keeps tilting back and forth, so it swings around the mean position every two weeks or so, by varying amounts.

We compared the two every six hours from 1900 to 2100 in an independent offline run of the same ephemeris the calculator uses. The gap averaged 0.96° (median 1.04°), was over 1° 52.7% of the time and over 1.5° 13.0% of the time, and peaked at 1.98° on October 11, 1905. The two put the node in different signs 3.2% of the time, about one birth in 31. Neither is wrong: the mean node is smoother, the true node closer to the Moon's real path. This site uses the true node throughout.

How Fast the Nodes Move

The nodes travel backward through the zodiac, from Aries into Pisces, then Aquarius, and so on. Because of its swings, the true node took between 536 and 633 days (17.6 to 20.8 months) per sign over the years in the table below. It even moves forward for short spells: about 26.5 times a year, for 3.6 days on average and up to 13.5 days, or 25.9% of the time in all. The calculator marks the node retrograde only when it was moving backward at your birth.

Find the row that contains your birth date: that is your North Node sign, and your South Node is the opposite sign at the same degree. Dates and times are Universal Time (UT, in practice the same as GMT), so if you were born near a change, convert your birth time to UT first or use the calculator above. The dates are for the true node, computed with the same ephemeris as the calculator. A mean-node table would put the same changes a median of 20 days and as much as 34 days earlier or later.

Because the true node swings, it sometimes crosses a sign boundary, steps back and crosses again. That happened four times in this range, over windows of 3.2 to 32.5 days. Each is merged into one sign change, dated to the first crossing, and the days the node spent back in the previous sign are listed under that row; anyone born in those days has the earlier sign. The North Node has been in Aquarius since July 27, 2026, and moves into Capricorn on March 26, 2028.

Prince William was born at 9:03 PM British Summer Time on June 21, 1982 in London, the time given in the official announcement of his birth. That is 20:03 UT. His Ascendant is 27°28′ Sagittarius, so in whole-sign houses Sagittarius is his 1st house and the houses follow sign by sign, which makes Cancer his 8th.

To read it with this page, take the Cancer entry in the sign list below, which covers the Cancer and Capricorn axis, and the 8th-house reading the calculator gives: the 2nd and 8th houses are the houses of one's own resources and shared ones. Both node settings agree on the sign and house here, because both sit in the middle of Cancer, far from a boundary.

Nodal Returns, Every 18.61 Years

A nodal return is the moving node coming back to its position at birth. The mean node does it every 18.61 years, at ages 18.6, 37.2, 55.8, 74.4. The true node can arrive a few weeks either side, and where its swings straddle the birth degree it can cross it two or three times within weeks. For Prince William, the true node crossed his natal degree once each time:

Astrologers read each nodal return as a time when the North Node's sign and house come back into focus. That is an interpretation; the dates above are measurements, and they depend on which node a program uses.

Indian astronomy and astrology call the North Node Rahu and the South Node Ketu. In the myth, Rahu is a demon beheaded for drinking the gods' nectar; his head swallows the Sun or Moon, causing eclipses. Both count among the nine grahas of Jyotish. Varahamihira's Brihat Samhita (6th century) already set the myth aside: its chapter on Rahu explains a lunar eclipse as the Moon entering the Earth's shadow and a solar eclipse as the Moon covering the Sun.

Persian astronomy pictured a dragon, Gōzihr, stretched between the nodes, with the ascending node as its head and the descending node as its tail (Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Gōzihr”). Arabic texts called them the head and tail of al-jawzahar, and medieval Latin texts called them Caput Draconis and Cauda Draconis, the Dragon's Head and Tail of medieval European astrology. Greek texts used the plainer terms anabibazōn and katabibazōn, the ascending and descending nodes.

These traditions judged the nodes by their effects rather than as a life direction. William Lilly's Christian Astrology (1647) gives the Head the nature of Jupiter and Venus, a fortune, and makes the Tail its contrary; Jyotish generally classes Rahu and Ketu as malefics.

Reading the North Node as a direction of growth and the South Node as a past to move beyond is modern. Martin Schulman's Karmic Astrology, Volume 1: The Moon's Nodes and Reincarnation (1975) tied the South Node to past lives and the North Node to the way forward, sign by sign and house by house. Jeffrey Wolf Green's evolutionary astrology, set out in his Pluto, Volume 1 (1985), reads the nodes together with Pluto. Much popular North Node writing since works in this frame, and the sign summaries on this page do too, without the reincarnation claims.