Ephemeris for 2014

It is a table recording where each planet stood in the sky on a given day. Astronomers compute these tables for navigation and observation; astrologers use them to build a birth chart or to see what is happening today. An ephemeris contains no interpretation at all – only numbers.

The date is on the left, then one column per planet. Each cell gives the degree and minute within the sign, then the sign's glyph. So 14°42′ ♈ reads as fourteen degrees forty-two minutes of Aries. An ℞ next to it means the planet is moving backward that day – it is retrograde.

That is simply the moment the position was calculated for. Classic printed references usually take midnight or noon UT. Here the default is midnight Eastern Time, and the button above the table switches to 0h UT. The Moon covers about 6–7 degrees in half a day, which is why the difference shows up most in its column.

The tropical zodiac is measured from the spring equinox point, the sidereal one from the fixed stars. Precession has pulled them about 24 degrees apart, which is nearly a whole sign: a Sun at the start of Leo tropically is in Cancer sidereally. Western astrology works in the tropical zodiac, Indian astrology (jyotish) in the sidereal one. The switch above the table changes only how the signs are laid out; the planetary positions themselves stay the same.

The planetary positions, yes – those are exactly the numbers you need. But a chart also has houses and an Ascendant, and those depend on the exact time and place of birth. The simpler route is the birth chart calculator: it works out both.