Transit

The current real-time motion of a planet across the sky, and the aspects it forms with the fixed positions in a person's natal chart.

A transit is, technically, the present-day movement of a planet through the zodiac. In practice, when an astrologer talks about transits they almost always mean the aspects that the moving (transiting) planets are forming with the fixed (natal) planets in a specific person's birth chart. Transits are how astrology tracks change over time.

Your natal chart never changes — it is the snapshot of where the planets sat at the moment of your birth. But the planets keep moving after you are born, and as they move, they form new geometric relationships with your natal positions. Today's Saturn might be conjunct your natal Mercury, and that conjunction is what an astrologer would describe as the central transit of your week, or your month, or your year, depending on how long it lasts.

Different planets have different transit characters because they move at different speeds. Moon transits last hours, Mercury and Venus transits last about a day or two each, Mars transits a few days, Sun transits a few days, Jupiter transits a week or two, and Saturn transits weeks to months. Pluto transits to a single natal point can last for years. The longer the transit, the deeper its felt influence usually is.

ZODIA's daily readings are built almost entirely from transit detection. The system reads your natal chart, computes the current positions of every major body, finds all aspects within a planet-specific orb, prioritizes them slow-planet first, and writes the day's reading from the transits that are actually active. Sun-sign horoscopes ignore your natal chart entirely; transit-based readings are the opposite.