What is My Zodiac Sign?

Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac: the yearly path of the Sun is cut into twelve equal arcs of 30°, measured from the March equinox, and your sign is the arc the Sun stood in on that date. Nothing but the date is needed, which is why this calculator asks for nothing else.

The Sun crosses a sign boundary at a particular hour, and that hour drifts by up to about a day between years, because the year is 365.2422 days long and leap days keep pulling it back. This page uses the conventional fixed date ranges, so a birth on a boundary day is worth checking against an ephemeris for that exact year and time of birth.

Vedic astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, anchored to the stars, while the Western one is anchored to the March equinox. Precession has pulled the two about 24° apart — roughly 24 days — so a sidereal chart usually places a person in the sign before the one shown here.

Astronomically the Sun really does pass in front of the constellation Ophiuchus, from about 30 November to 17 December. But the tropical zodiac is not a map of constellations: it is twelve equal 30° divisions of the solar year, so it has twelve signs by construction. The constellations themselves are wildly unequal — the Sun spends about seven days in Scorpius against about 45 in Virgo.