Every word used in horoscopes and natal charts, explained on its own — and without other unexplained words inside the explanation. If you have ever opened an astrology app, understood nothing and closed it, that was not your fault.
The rule of this glossary: no explanation leans on another term from the list. If understanding "orb" requires reading "aspect" first, a glossary becomes the very jargon it was meant to cure.
Where every chart starts.
direction — the thing you return to
Your Sun sign is the one people mean when they ask what sign you are. It shows where your core energy points and what you do when nobody is making you. The Sun spends about a month in each sign, so you share it with millions — nothing else in the chart works that way.
the condition under which you recover
The Moon is not "your emotions". It is what you need in order to settle and recharge: quiet, attention, order, motion — it differs for everyone. The Moon changes sign every two and a half days, so people born on the same day easily have different ones.
the degree rising over the horizon at your birth minute
This is the point that was genuinely rising in the east the moment you were born. It moves one degree every four minutes — which is why it cannot be computed without a birth time, and why it is the most personal thing in a chart. It describes the first impression: how people read you before they know you.
What a chart is made of, and what is what.
the area of life where something happens
A chart is divided into twelve sectors, each covering an area of life: the first is you, the seventh is close partnership, the tenth is work and reputation. The sign says HOW something works; the house says WHERE it shows up. The same planet in different houses surfaces in different parts of life.
the exact place inside a sign, 0 to 30
The zodiac is 360 degrees split into twelve signs of thirty. Saying "Moon in Leo" is like saying "somewhere in this city". The degree is the address: 29°28′ Leo means the Moon is half a degree from leaving the sign, and that is a completely different story from 2° Leo.
the material you work with
The twelve signs fall into four groups of three: fire, earth, air, water. This is not personality but the way you take hold of a thing — start it, build it, talk it through, feel it out. An empty element does not mean something is missing, it means it is not built in: you do deliberately what others do without thinking, and often better for having learned it.
your role in motion: start, hold, adapt
A second split of the same twelve signs, four to a group. Cardinal starts, fixed holds, mutable adapts. It shows clearest in a group of people: someone launches the thing, someone keeps it from falling apart, someone rebuilds it while it runs.
the planet whose character the sign inherits
Every sign has a planet that owns it: Leo has the Sun, Scorpio has Pluto, Libra has Venus. The ruler of your rising sign matters most: wherever that planet sits is where your life mainly routes through. It is what turns "you are Aquarius rising" into something specific.
three or more bodies in one sign
When three or more planets gather in a single sign, that sign stops being one trait among many and starts drowning out the rest of the chart. People with a stellium usually recognise themselves in their sign’s description far more than others do — because there is genuinely more of it in them.
The sky does not stand still. This is how it moves.
the angle between two bodies — and how they talk through it
Draw a line from Earth to two planets and there is an angle between them. Certain angles are treated as meaningful: 0°, 60°, 90°, 120°, 180°. The angle does not physically "influence" anything — it is a way of saying two parts of a chart are linked, and naming the character of that link: easy, tense, or fused.
zero degrees — two things fused into one
Two bodies sit at nearly the same point in the sky. They stop acting separately: they amplify each other and show up together, and in behaviour they usually cannot be told apart. Not "good" or "bad" — it depends entirely on what fused.
one hundred twenty degrees — it comes easily
The easiest of the angles. What a trine links works without effort and therefore often goes unnoticed: people rarely value in themselves what comes free. The flip side is that exactly this tends to stay undeveloped.
ninety degrees — friction that moves you
Two parts of the chart pull in different directions and cannot agree. It is uncomfortable, and it is also the engine: most of what a person actually builds is built out of squares. A chart without them usually means not peace but stillness.
one hundred eighty degrees — two facing each other
The bodies stand at opposite ends of the chart and see each other completely. It is a standing choice between two needs that are both yours — and it usually resolves not by one winning but by alternating. Oppositions are often lived through other people: what you will not own in yourself you find in a partner.
the tolerance: how far off the angle can be and still count
Angles between planets are almost never exactly 90 or 120 degrees. So each is given a band of tolerance — a few degrees either way. The smaller the deviation, the stronger the link: an aspect half a degree from exact is felt, one seven degrees off barely is.
a planet that looks, from Earth, like it is going backwards
This is a real observed phenomenon and there is nothing mystical about it. Planets do not reverse — Earth moves faster on the inner orbit and overtakes the outer planet, the way one car overtakes another. From our side the overtaken planet appears to move backwards for a few weeks, tracing a loop across the sky. In astrology that stretch is read as time to revisit what is started, not to start something new.
how much of the disc is lit — and which way it is going
The Moon does not shine on its own: we see the side the Sun lights. The wider the angle between them, the more of it is lit. What matters is not the percentage but the direction: a waxing Moon and the same percentage waning are different things.
The deck, the positions, and what a reversed card means.
twenty-two cards about the large turns
The deck splits in two. There are twenty-two majors, from the Fool to the World, and they speak about what changes a life rather than a week. When a spread is full of them, the question is bigger than the person asking it thought.
fifty-six cards about the everyday
Four suits — cups, pentacles, swords, wands — of fourteen cards each. They deal with the current: money, conversations, work, this week’s feelings. A spread of only minors usually means the matter is solvable and in your hands.
the same meaning, turned inward or slowed down
A reversed card does not mean the opposite and does not mean trouble. Most often it is the same thing but not outward: a force held in, a process slowed, or a quality turned back on itself. Sometimes it simply means "not yet".
entry, state, projection — from where, where, toward what
The same card means different things depending on where it lands. The first position says what brought the current state about; the second, where things stand now; the third, where this is leaning if nothing changes. The third is not a prophecy: it is a direction, not an event.
Where the numbers come from. You can check.
the table giving every body an exact place at every moment
Planetary positions are not guessed — they are computed. There are published orbital elements and proven formulae behind them, the same ones astronomers use to predict eclipses years ahead. CosmicSync uses that machinery: everything is computed on the device itself, with no network request.
published orbital elements from NASA JPL
Orbital elements come from NASA JPL’s Solar System Dynamics publication, and the Sun and Moon from the Meeus series, the standard reference for astronomical computation. A correction for precession — the slow drift of the equinox point — is applied on top. The data is public and anyone can check it.
depends on whether the birth time is known
Planetary signs can be computed without a birth time — they change slowly. The ascendant and the houses cannot: the ascendant shifts a degree every four minutes. So an honest app states its precision openly and refuses to invent an ascendant when the time is unknown, rather than quietly assuming noon.
one sign, one house, no fractions
There are several ways to divide a chart into twelve, and they give different boundaries. CosmicSync uses the oldest and simplest: the sign holding the ascendant becomes the whole first house, the next sign the second, and so on. It is easier to explain, leaves less room to hide an error, and the boundaries do not jump around with the birth minute.
the device computes the numbers, a model writes the words
Computation and text are different things. Degrees, houses, aspects and phases are computed by the app itself and come out the same for anyone computing the same thing. The prose over those numbers is written by a language model following instructions that forbid it to invent placements or contradict what was computed. So the numbers can be checked, and the text can be read as interpretation, which is what it is.
CosmicSync computes the positions of the planets at the minute you were born from published orbital elements, and explains every term right where it appears. The first three readings are free.