Don’t Know Your Birth Time?

Over the course of a day, few planets travel far. Only the moon moves more than about 1 degree. Here’s what you can find out about your chart, without knowing your birth time:

1. The sign and position, within 1°, for your Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and everything further from the Sun than those.
2. The sign for your Moon, or 2 possibilities for your Moon sign.
3. All of your aspects between planets, that don’t involve the Moon.

Here’s what you can’t know about your chart without the birth time:

1. The positions of your houses and your house placements.
2. The degrees of the angles of your chart, your Asc/Desc and MC/IC axes.
3. The degree and aspects of your Moon (definitively).

If you don’t know your birth time, it’s definitely worth looking up your chart anyway.  In my opinion, the most important parts of a chart to explore, in order, are planets in the houses, planetary aspects, and planets in the signs.  All of them are important, of course, and they all need to be combined when reading a chart. Without a birth time, you can’t know your houses, but you can know your aspects and most of your planet positions. Exploring those things alone will keep you busy for a while.

When you’re ready to try figuring out your birth time, here are some tips:

• Narrow your birth time down to a range. Ask your parents or other relatives, including older siblings, anyone who might have been there. Was is in the morning, the wee hours or had the sun come out?  Was it late at night?  The middle of the afternoon, around when school let out?  Once you have a range, open two tabs with the birth chart lookup form, enter your birth date and location in each, then enter the first time in one, perhaps 6am if the range starts around sunrise, and the second time in the other, noon if it was “sometime in the morning.” The chart rotates clockwise, so after putting these two times into a sample chart (today’s), I see in the pictures below that the Ascendant moves through four signs–Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer–during that time.  One of those is this person’s Rising sign. Notice that the Midheaven also shifts through four signs, Capricorn through Aries.

Sample Chart at 6am

Same Sample Chart at 12pm.

 

• Figure out your Rising sign. This may be easy, if you have a strong sense of the first impression that you make and a good understanding of the signs, or it might not be so easy, but it helps if you have a range. In our example, the chart holder can read descriptions of the four possible Rising signs and compare them to determine which seems most accurate. Many of the websites and YouTube channels linked on my resources page offer Rising sign descriptions, but you can also try this site or this one.
• Figure out your Midheaven sign. Your Midheaven (MC) is more conscious than your Ascendant. The opposite end of it, your IC, describes your childhood home/ family life. The MC is your public persona that you craft as a direct response to your upbringing. I’ve had problems identifying with my Rising sign, but my MC/IC axis is something that I’m acutely aware of. The case could be the same for you. This playlist of videos on the Midheaven signs is great, as well as this page and this page.

 

Feel free to comment here or contact me directly if you want some help figuring out your birth time, or narrowing down the range. I have more to say about it, and I’ll write more on this topic in the future.