Right Now

Why "right now" is five pages and not one

A single page saying "here is the sky" would have to answer five questions of five different shapes in one table, and it would answer none of them well. Where a planet is, is a coordinate: a degree, a sign, a direction of travel. Whether a planet is retrograde is not a coordinate at all — it is an interval with a start and an end, and the useful answer is a pair of dates, not a status word. An aspect is neither: it is a relationship between two bodies, and the only honest presentation of it is a grid with an orb column, because "in aspect" is a continuum and the number is the whole content. The Moon is its own case again, moving fast enough that a page about it is really a page about the next few days. Splitting them lets each one print the shape its question actually has.

What a live reading costs

Every one of these pages ships with a committed snapshot in its markup and then replaces the block with a recomputed one when it loads. That design is deliberate and it has a price worth naming. The static half is exact at the instant stamped on it and drifts thereafter, fast for the Moon and slowly for Pluto; the live half is exact at the moment you arrive but requires one request to the ephemeris to get there. A reader with scripting disabled, or a crawler that never runs it, sees the snapshot with its timestamp printed beside it — which is why the timestamp is printed rather than hidden. The alternative, a page that quietly serves a figure from last week under the word "now", is the failure this arrangement exists to make impossible.

The frame these numbers are in

Positions here are geocentric and tropical: measured from the Earth, along the ecliptic, from the March equinox point. A sidereal table shows the same bodies roughly twenty-four degrees earlier and will name a different sign for most of them on any given day, which is the single most common reason two sites disagree about where Mercury is. Instants are UTC. That matters more than it looks: a sign change at 23:40 UTC has already happened for a reader in Sydney and has not happened for a reader in Los Angeles, so a page that prints only a date is making a claim that is false for a third of its audience. These pages print the minute and say which clock it is on.

Where the chart-specific reading begins

Nothing on these five pages is about anyone in particular, and no amount of detail added to them would make it so. A transit is a relationship between a moving body and a fixed point in a birth chart, so it needs the second set of points before it exists at all. That is the line this group stops at, and it is the line every page in it hands across: the research library interprets the contact, and the app dates it.