Find Your
Vertex Sign

The Vertex is a point in the birth chart, not a planet: the degree of the zodiac that lay due west of your birthplace at the moment you were born. More exactly, it is where the ecliptic, the Sun's yearly path, crosses the prime vertical, the circle that runs from due east through the point straight overhead to due west. This calculator finds that degree, its sign, its Whole Sign house and the Anti-Vertex opposite it.

Because it is fixed by the time and place of birth, the Vertex behaves like the Ascendant and Midheaven: it changes from minute to minute, and two people born at the same moment in different cities have different Vertices. Astrologers who use it read it as a point of meetings and events that start with someone else, which is why it is often called the Point of Fate. That reading goes back to the two astrologers who introduced the point in the mid-twentieth century; it is an interpretive tradition, not a measured effect.

The calculator sends your birth date, time, time zone and coordinates to our API. The API converts the local time to UTC with the IANA time zone database, so daylight saving time is handled, and then runs the house calculation for that moment and place. That one step returns the house cusps, the Ascendant, the Midheaven and the Vertex together, so the Vertex is computed from the same sidereal time and latitude as your rising degree.

Geometrically, the Vertex is the Ascendant of a stand-in chart: the degree that would rise at the co-latitude (90° minus your latitude, in the same hemisphere) when your IC is on the Midheaven. The API's result matches that construction exactly, and printed tables of houses were used the same way to find the Vertex by hand. The Vertex itself does not depend on the house system; only the house you count it in does. The Anti-Vertex is the same degree in the opposite sign, which the calculator adds by moving 180°.

Houses are Whole Sign: the sign on the Ascendant is the 1st house, the next sign the 2nd, and so on. That matters for the Vertex. It always lies on the western side of the chart, and at the latitudes of Sydney, New York or London it falls in the 5th to 8th house in Placidus and other quadrant systems. With Whole Sign houses the range at the same latitudes runs one house further, to the 9th: the 7th house is the whole sign that holds the Descendant, so a Vertex well past a late Descendant lands two signs on. The worked example below is in the 9th.

Latitude matters more for the Vertex than for most points. The prime vertical is tilted away from the equator of the sky (the Earth's equator projected outward) by exactly the birth latitude, so the Vertex can never lie farther north or south of that line than the birthplace lies from the Earth's equator. Outside the tropics that rules nothing out, and the Vertex moves forward through all 12 signs every day: at the latitudes of Sydney, New York and London, 1° takes between 1.3 and 6.1 minutes. Inside the tropics it does rule signs out: from Mumbai the Vertex never reaches Gemini, Cancer, Sagittarius or Capricorn, and from Singapore it stays within 3.4° of 0° Aries or 0° Libra. On the equator it is always exactly one of the two.

In the tropics the point also runs backward through the zodiac for part of each day (about 21% of it in Mumbai) and jumps by 180° twice a day, because the house calculation deliberately keeps it in the western half of the sky. At high latitudes the reverse happens: the Vertex moves evenly, while the Ascendant becomes erratic and Placidus houses cannot be drawn at all. Whole Sign houses, which this calculator uses, work at any latitude.

The figures come from the same house calculation, run every 30 seconds through one sidereal day; the houses and the Vertex depend only on sidereal time and latitude, so a day covers every birth time of the year. The ephemeris, its date range and the conventions used across the site are on the methodology page.

Prince William was born at 9:03 PM British Summer Time on June 21, 1982, in London; the time is from the official birth announcement. In UTC that is 20:03. These are the positions the calculator returns for that chart, with Whole Sign houses:

1. Position. The Vertex is at 12°01′ Leo, 132.03° of ecliptic longitude. At 9:03 PM that degree of the zodiac stood due west of London, 22.2° above the horizon; the Anti-Vertex, 12°02′ Aquarius, was due east and the same distance below it.
2. Sign and house. The Ascendant is 27°28′ Sagittarius, so Sagittarius is the 1st house. Counting on, Capricorn is the 2nd, Aquarius the 3rd, and Leo the 9th. The Vertex is in the 9th house and the Anti-Vertex in the 3rd.
3. Relation to the Descendant. The Descendant is 27°29′ Gemini. The Vertex lies 44.6° further along the zodiac, between the Descendant and the Midheaven (2°27′ Scorpio): the quarter of the chart above the western horizon, which matches its height in the sky. At London's latitude the gap can never exceed about 45°, so this Vertex is about as far from the Descendant as it can be.
4. House system. Because the Ascendant is late in its sign, the 7th whole-sign house (Gemini) ends only 2.5° after the Descendant, and the Vertex crosses two sign boundaries to reach Leo. In Placidus houses the 7th runs from 27°29′ Gemini to 12°44′ Leo, so the same point is in the Placidus 7th, 42′ short of the next cusp. Check which system a source uses before comparing house readings.
5. Birth time. With the same date and place, the Vertex stays in Leo for any birth time from 8:03 PM to 10:32 PM, so the sign is secure. The house is not: 12 minutes later the Ascendant moves into Capricorn, and the Vertex, then at 14°26′ Leo, would count as the 8th house. A birth time 10 minutes either side moves the degree to 10°02′ Leo or 14°02′ Leo.

The reading for this chart would be the Vertex in Leo entry below, with the 9th house text the calculator shows. The example is here to show the arithmetic, so we attach no claims about Prince William's life to it.

The Vertex is a twentieth-century addition to astrology. L. Edward Johndro (1882–1951), a Canadian-born engineer and astrologer and the author of The Earth in the Heavens and The Stars: How and Where They Influence (both 1929), worked with the point of the ecliptic due east, which he called the electrical ascendant.

Charles A. Jayne (1911–1985), who corresponded with Johndro but never met him, tested that point by running solar arc directions to it and found the opposite point, due west, more responsive. Johndro's own tests agreed, and that western point is the one now called the Vertex. Most accounts place this work in the 1940s; Johndro died in 1951. Both men read the point as one of events beyond a person's control, the source of the “Point of Fate” label.

Sources

• The Urania Trust, Edward Johndro (1882–1951) and Charles Jayne (1911–1985), in its Celebrated Astrologers series.
• “Johndro, L. Edward (1882–1951)”, Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, via Encyclopedia.com.
• Brian Clark, The Vertex and Anti-Vertex (PDF), Astro*Synthesis.