Zodiac sign by date of birth

Because almost everyone answers from a fixed date table such as "Taurus: 21 April – 21 May", while the Sun enters a sign at an instant that wanders across two or three calendar days from year to year. We checked this against 24,837 birth dates from 1945 to 2012: one widespread table is wrong for 1.27 % of them, another for 1.49 %, and the two tables contradict each other on 2.46 %. The worst single date is 19 February, where the table that calls it Pisces is wrong in 50 years out of 68.

The one the Sun was in at the moment you were born — exactly one sign, not "a bit of both". Enter the date and the tool shows the crossing instant in your time zone: if the Sun entered Taurus at 16:21, then someone born at 09:00 is Aries and someone born at 20:00 is Taurus. The bar under the answer shows the whole day at once, and the slider lets you test any hour.

The Sun enters a sign at one instant for the whole planet, but that instant falls at a different local time in every zone — and sometimes on a different calendar day. For 97.5 % of dates this changes nothing; for the rest it changes the answer. It matters most for births under historic clock rules: Moscow ran on UTC+4 on 20 April 1985, not UTC+3, because Soviet decree time and summer time were both in force. We read the offset for your birth date from the time-zone database and show it next to the answer.

No. NASA does not practise astrology and changed nothing; in 2016 its children's site pointed out that the Sun passes through 13 constellations and that the Babylonians kept 12 to match their months. A constellation is not a sign: signs are measured from the spring equinox and are exactly 30° each, while constellations are patches of sky of very different widths. The tool shows both — the Sun really is in Ophiuchus from about 29 November to 18 December, roughly 19 days, against only about 7 in Scorpius.

Most likely you were born in January or early February. The eastern year does not start on 1 January but on the new moon that opens the first month of the Chinese calendar, between 21 January and 21 February. Someone born on 1 February 2008 is not a Rat but a Pig, because that new year did not arrive until 7 February. Tables that map birth year straight to an animal miss this and get it wrong for roughly one person in six. We compute the new year from the real lunisolar rule and checked it against 27 published dates, including the contested year 2033.

In where zero is. Western (tropical) astrology measures the start of Aries from the spring equinox; Indian (sidereal) astrology measures it from the fixed stars. Precession pulls those two points apart by about 50 arcseconds a year, and they are now almost 24° apart — nearly a whole sign. That is why most people's Vedic sign is the one before their Western sign. It is not a dispute about facts: both describe the same position of the Sun, measured from different origins. You can pick the ayanamsa — Lahiri, Fagan–Bradley, Krishnamurti or Raman.

The ingress instants are computed with the same astronomical model as the natal chart on this site (VSOP87 and NOVAS) and checked against the NASA JPL Horizons ephemeris. Our March equinox for 2026 comes out at 14:45:36 UTC on 20 March, matching the published 14:46. The Sun's degree inside the sign is anchored to those same ingress instants, so it stays within 2 arcseconds of the full model and the printed degree can never contradict the printed crossing time.