Photo by woodleywonderworks (cc)
Planetary orbital periods are a central part of astrology, because the cycles of transiting aspects are defined by each planet’s orbit. The fastest planets, with short orbital periods, set the short-term rhythms of life, while the outer planets take a lifetime to experience the full cycle, or even just part of it. Because of this everyone experiences some transits, while other transits people can go their whole life without encountering. Outer planets conjuncting natal planets are an example; not everyone will experience Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto transiting their sun due to the long orbital cycle.
Sun – 365 days
Moon – 28 days
Mercury – 88 days
Venus – 225 days (about 7.5 months)
Mars – 2 years (23 months)
Jupiter – 12 years
Saturn – 29.5 years
Uranus – 84 years
Neptune – 165 years
Pluto – 248 years
We each experience a planetary return transit when a planet returns to the place in the chart where the natal planet is. For example, my natal Mercury is at 29 Libra. Approximately every 88 days, Mercury makes a full rotation around the sun and returns to the same place in the chart as the natal planet– so when Mercury returns to 29 Libra, whatever day and hour it happens to be, that’s called my Mercury return.
Your birthday is called a solar return, in astrological terms. It’s when the sun returns to the same place in the zodiac it was when you were born, which happens to be once a year. Your solar return isn’t always the same calendar date of your birthday… it may fall the day before or the say after. This is because astrologers calculate the exact degree of a planetary return and that can shift the time forward or back several hours.
From the list above, you can see that some planetary returns and aspects happen frequently, and some only once in a lifetime or not at all. Because lifespans are longer now, more people are living to their Uranus return and Neptune opposition and experiencing a new kind of completion, in their eighties, that was previously rare.
