Chronos
Solar Return
Every year, the Sun returns to exactly its birth position: this instant sets the chart for your year ahead. Enter your birth details to calculate it.
Only the year is used — the solar return always falls near your birthday.
What is the solar return?
The Sun takes one year to travel the entire zodiac. The solar return designates the exact instant when, each year, it passes back over the degree it occupied at your birth. The chart drawn at that precise instant — planets, Ascendant, houses — traditionally gives the tone of the year beginning.
Unlike the Saturn return, which isolates a single planetary cycle every 29 years, the solar return draws an entire chart every year: it is then compared to the birth chart through its crossed aspects, not through a single recovered degree.
How the calculation is done
The engine first determines the Sun’s exact longitude at your birth, via the Swiss Ephemeris. It then searches, using Newton’s method (convergence within a few iterations, precision below the milliarcsecond), for the precise instant in the target year when the transiting Sun recovers exactly that natal longitude.
The full chart is then calculated at that instant, at the same geographic coordinates as the birth — without relocation. Each planet of this annual chart is then compared to the birth chart, and its natal house is retrieved, to locate which area of life each influence of the year plays out in.
Frequently asked questions
- What exactly is the solar return?
- Each year, the Sun travels the entire zodiac again and passes back, at a precise instant, exactly over the degree it occupied at your birth. The solar return is the sky chart drawn at that precise instant — not the calendar day of your birthday, but the exact minute this return happens, which can fall the day before or after depending on the year.
- How does the solar return differ from the birth chart?
- The birth chart is fixed: it never changes. The solar return is an annual chart, recalculated each year from the same place and time of birth, but with the real planetary positions at the moment of the Sun's return. It's a chart in its own right, then compared to the birth chart through its crossed aspects.
- Should you account for where you live at the time of the birthday?
- The calculator above uses the birth coordinates, without relocation — a recognized practice in solar return work (called "at the birthplace"), but not the only one: a distinct school calculates the solar return at the real place of residence for the current year. This relocation option isn't offered here for now.
- Is the calculation reliable without a precise birth time?
- The instant of the solar return itself depends only on the birth date, not the time. But the Ascendant and houses of the solar return depend directly on the exact time of that found instant — an uncertain birth time therefore weakens the reading of the year's houses, less so that of the planets in sign.
- How do you read the aspects between the solar return and the birth chart?
- The year's planets (solar return) form aspects with the birth planets (birth chart): these crossed aspects traditionally give the tone of the coming year, complementing the natal house occupied by the return's Ascendant.