Retrograde planets 2026–2027

A planet is retrograde when, seen from the Earth, it appears to move backwards through the zodiac. Nothing turns round in space: the Earth overtakes an outer planet, or an inner one overtakes the Earth, and the planet's place against the stars runs back for a while before it moves on again. The Sun and the Moon never do this, so they never station and are not in this calendar.

A station is the moment the planet's motion stops and changes direction: it turns retrograde, and weeks or months later it turns direct. Around each station the planet hardly moves, and it counts as stationary while it covers less than a set distance a day: about 8′ of arc for Mercury, 6′ for Venus, 3′ for Mars, under half a minute for Jupiter and Saturn, and a few seconds for Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. These are the same limits behind the S the app's charts show, which is why the calendar marks stationary days, not only the station itself.

A retrograde planet goes back over ground it has just crossed. The stretch of the zodiac between the two stations is its shadow: the planet enters it moving direct before it turns retrograde (the pre-shadow), and leaves it only when it has moved forward again past the degree where it turned (the post-shadow).

So the shadow runs from the moment the planet first reaches the degree of its coming direct station to the moment it regains the degree of its retrograde station. For Mercury that is about eight weeks in all; for the planets from Jupiter out it is ten months to over a year.

In traditional horary practice retrogradation means going back or going the wrong way. It is a serious weakness unless the question itself is about a return, such as something lost coming back or an old job taken up again, in which case it is exactly what fits. A station is the planet's weakest moment: the first station, turning retrograde, is likened to a man taking to his sickbed, the second, turning direct, to a man rising from it, still weak.

William Lilly, in Christian Astrology (1647), counts a retrograde significator against the matter: discord and much contradiction, a running back on what was done, or the business left unfinished. He also notes that a planet turning retrograde before it reaches another breaks off the aspect, so what it promised does not happen.

Every station is solved from the Swiss Ephemeris, built on NASA JPL's DE431: the moment the planet's geocentric, tropical longitude stops changing, found to the second from the ephemeris itself rather than read off a table of daily positions. The stationary periods and the shadows are solved the same way.

The times on this page are in your time zone. Read without a browser, the page states them in UTC. The calendar runs from 2025 to 2124.