Locational astrology
Astrocartography
Your chart, laid over the Earth — and an honest account of what that can and cannot tell you.
Astrocartography is a branch of astrology that projects a birth chart onto a map of the world. Each planet traces lines marking where it was rising, setting, overhead or underfoot at the moment you were born. Developed by the American astrologer Jim Lewis in the 1970s, it is also called locational or relocation astrology, and it is used to read what a place would ask of a person.
The number most free maps never mention
The entire technique hangs off sidereal time, which advances 15° every hour. That single fact decides whether a map means anything at all, because it means an error in your birth time is not a small blur around a line — it is the line somewhere else entirely.
Someone who says they were born “around nine in the morning” has an uncertainty wider than most countries. Nearly every free map online will happily draw them a line through a named city anyway.
We measure it instead of assuming it. The engine recomputes the whole geometry at both edges of the implied window, at the latitude you are asking about, and reports what actually moved. Three kinds of reading fall out of that measurement — and which one you get is a fact about your birth record, not a judgement about you.
What your birth time actually buys
| If your time is… | What can honestly be said |
|---|---|
| Exact to the minute | A line through a named city is a real claim. Everything is available — lines, crossings, local direction, timing windows. |
| Rounded “about 9am” | Lines are discarded completely: at this precision a line moves about 1,580 km, which is no evidence at all. The bands survive — they move about half a kilometre — and for a typical chart bands still reach 60–80% of cities. You still get named places; they are just earned differently. |
| Unknown date only | Nothing that depends on the Earth's rotation. What survives is real and worth having: which threads are strong in you, and the north–south bands those threads run along. |
This is not hedging. A soft birth time does not make the same reading less certain — it makes a different reading true. You get that reading fully and confidently, not a watered-down version of somebody else's with the word “possibly” added.
Why there is no compatibility score
Almost every tool in this category ends by collapsing a place into one number, or one word. We refuse to, and it is the most consequential design decision here.
What a place gives you and what it costs you are two separate findings. Average them and you destroy the only information that mattered: a place that supports you enormously and demands a great deal is not the same as a place that does neither, yet both land near the middle of any single scale. People move for the first kind. Nobody should be sent to the second by a number.
So a reading names both, side by side, every time — and never resolves them for you.
And an empty result is not a bad result
If nothing measurable reaches a place, we say so. A place with no evidence and a place that scored badly look identical in a pair of numbers and mean opposite things. One is “this would be hard for you”; the other is “I have nothing to tell you about here.” Reporting them as the same number would be the single easiest way to mislead someone about a decision this size.
What people actually ask
Almost nobody asks what their map says. In practice the question is one of six, and the same geometry answers them differently:
| What you'd say | What you're really asking |
|---|---|
| “Should I take the job in Dubai?” | Is this move worth what it costs |
| “I've been unhappy here for years” | Explain my present, before any move |
| “Where should I go?” | Give me somewhere to start looking |
| “Is Lisbon or Berlin better for us?” | Rank a shortlist I already have |
| “When should I move?” | Timing, not place |
| “I can't move. Anything else?” | Scale it down to direction |
The second one is the one most readings get wrong. Answering “where should I go” to someone asking “why has here been so hard” is both less useful and less kind — because the question they asked has an answer they can use today, and check against their own memory.
Which is why a reading starts with the ground you are standing on, not with somewhere you might go.
Astrocartography or a relocation chart?
| Astrocartography | Relocation chart | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A search across the whole Earth at once | A test of one specific place |
| Answers | Where is anything notable at all? | What would this exact city be like? |
| Use it to | Build a shortlist | Examine what is on the shortlist |
| Birth time | Governs how much can be claimed | Governs the houses, so it is essential |
They are not rivals. The map narrows the world to a handful of candidates; the relocated chart reads those candidates properly. Most good decisions use both, in that order.
Common questions
Do I need my exact birth time?
For a claim about a named city, yes. For a useful reading, no — see the table above. What changes is not how confident we sound; it is which findings exist.
Can it tell me where to live?
No, and anything that says otherwise is selling you something. Visas, money, family, work and safety decide where you live. This describes what a place would ask of you and what it would give back. That is a real input to a decision and it is not the decision.
Does my birthplace mean something?
It carries real geometry and zero biography. It is the point the sky was read from — not somewhere that shaped you, unless you happened to grow up there. Where you have actually lived is something worth being asked, never something to be inferred from a birth certificate.
Is it free?
Cosmic Terrain — our astrocartography reading — is free to start. It needs a free account, because it works from your own date, time and place of birth.
Read your own ground
Cosmic Terrain places your chart on the Earth: compare a shortlist, search the world, or simply understand the place you are standing in right now. Free to start.
Open Cosmic TerrainNeeds a free account — it reads from your exact birth details. Not sure of your birth time? Start anyway; the reading tells you what it can and cannot claim.
The lines, one at a time
Each body draws four lines around the Earth, and each is read twice — what it gives and what it costs, never averaged. Start wherever your question is.