A hundred and eighty degrees, and eight of leeway
The opposition is the second easiest aspect to picture. Two bodies stand at opposite ends of a straight line through the centre of the chart. This site allows eight degrees of orb, so anything from a hundred and seventy two to a hundred and eighty eight degrees counts.
Uranus is close to stationary against that scale, so the Sun makes the aspect on its own, sweeping the sixteen degree band in around sixteen days. Once a year, every year, a fortnight of births carries it. That places the aspect at roughly four to five per cent of charts, and it is the reason a description of Sun opposite Uranus can never be a description of a person.
Dialogue instead of merger
The Sun is conscious purpose and vitality, the deliberate self. Uranus is the corrective, the part that interrupts, the refusal to keep doing something because it is what was already being done. In a conjunction those two share a degree and cannot be told apart. In an opposition they are in different signs and different houses, and each can see what the other is up to.
The practical version is that the disruption tends to arrive from outside. People with the aspect often describe circumstances, employers or other people as the unstable element, when the chart is describing a polarity they carry. The traditional advice is unusually sensible here: locate both ends, not one.
Because the signs are opposite, they share a mode. That gives the pairing a particular flavour, and a fixed-sign opposition behaves quite differently from a mutable one. Fixed tends to hold a position for years and then break it in one movement. Mutable revises continually and rarely presents a single point of rupture. Cardinal starts over, repeatedly, which is often mistaken for indecision when the chart is describing something closer to serial commitment.
The axis is the reading
An opposition always falls across a pair of houses, and that axis is where the personal detail lives. Sun in the sixth opposing Uranus in the twelfth is a working life quarrelling with something the person cannot articulate. Sun in the fourth opposing Uranus in the tenth is a home life and a public role pulling in opposite directions. Same aspect, different lives.
All of that depends on the birth time. Without one, the house axis is unusable and the honest reading falls back to the sign axis, which everyone born that year shares. Say so rather than inventing detail. A rounded birth time is worse than an unknown one in a specific way: it looks precise and is not, and the houses move about a degree every four minutes.
Orb, retrogrades and what to discount
Tight oppositions, inside about two degrees, are worth taking seriously and often show up as a lifelong theme the person recognises immediately. Between two and five the aspect is real but shares the stage. Past five it thins out fast, and a seven degree opposition with nothing else supporting it is not the story of the chart.
Uranus spends close to five months of the year retrograde, so a natal retrograde Uranus is unremarkable. What does matter is whether the Sun or Uranus is also tied to a personal point, an angle or a fast body. A lone wide opposition between the Sun and a planet that takes eighty four years to circle the zodiac is background, and reading it as destiny is exactly the mistake this site tries not to make.
The widget above returns the orb to the minute, so you can decide with a number instead of a guess.
Questions people ask about this
What does Sun opposite Uranus mean?
The tradition reads it as conscious purpose facing the impulse to break pattern, held across the chart so that each side is visible to the other. It usually shows up as tension between a settled direction and a recurring need to change it.
Is Sun opposite Uranus rare?
No. Uranus is almost stationary compared with the Sun, so the aspect covers a fortnight of births each year, around four or five per cent of charts. Roughly the same share of people have the conjunction.
Why do people say the disruption comes from other people?
Because an opposition sits across the chart rather than at a single point, and the far end often feels external. The reading is more useful if you treat both ends as yours, since the aspect describes a polarity you carry rather than something happening to you.
Do I need my birth time?
For anything specific, yes. The signs involved are shared by everyone born that year. The house axis is what distinguishes one chart from another, and houses shift by a degree every four minutes.
Does an opposition mean conflict?
Not in the sense of something going wrong. It means two functions are placed where they answer each other. Whether that reads as argument or as balance depends on the signs, the houses and what else contacts those degrees.
How tight does the orb need to be?
Inside two degrees it tends to be unmistakable. Between two and five it is one theme among several. Beyond five, treat it as background unless another part of the chart repeats the same idea.