Free Alternative to the Usual 17 December Birthday Page

Why the usual answer repeats itself

A sun sign is a thirty degree stretch that takes about a month to cross. Describing somebody by it means describing everybody born in that month the same way, which is why write ups of adjacent dates are difficult to tell apart.

The tradition was never that coarse. Each sign was divided into three faces of ten degrees, and the whole circle into thirty six of them, long before newspaper columns existed. Terms, bounds and degrees were part of the ordinary working vocabulary.

So the flatness of most birthday material is a modern simplification rather than an inherited limit. It comes from the fact that a date is the only input most publications ever had.

Once a birthplace and an hour are available the picture changes completely, and the sign becomes one line in a much longer description rather than the whole of it.

The position on this date

Taken at noon across the years from 1930 to 2035, a 17 December Sun runs from about twenty four and a half to twenty six degrees of Sagittarius. That is a spread of roughly one degree over the whole period, which surprises people who expect the leap year to scatter it further.

The reason it does not is that the leap rule was designed to cancel exactly the error it corrects. Each ordinary year the noon position advances a fraction of a degree, and the extra February day pulls it back, so the sequence returns to nearly the same place every four years.

What that means practically is that a figure quoted for this date is close to right for anyone born on it in the past century, and the widget above sharpens it for your own year, hour and birthplace.

The face, and what is attached to it

Twenty five degrees sits in the third face of Sagittarius, which runs from twenty to thirty. The Chaldean order gives that band to Saturn while Jupiter keeps the sign, and the triplicity scheme gives it to Leo instead.

The Saturn reading treats the closing degrees of Sagittarius as the sign after its enthusiasm has been tested, and associates them with endurance and the long route. The Leo reading of the same band leans toward visibility and confidence. Both are interpretation, carried by different lineages, and neither can be checked the way a degree can.

That distinction is the point of stating the position first. The measurement is one kind of claim and the reading is another, and mixing them is how birthday pages end up saying nothing checkable at all.

What still has no answer

The Moon may be in either of two signs on this date, since it moves about half a sign a day and can cross at any hour. The Ascendant may be any of the twelve, because the whole zodiac rises in the course of a day and the horizon is local to a place.

Every house position depends on that Ascendant, so the areas of life the planets are read into are unsettled as well. A date supplies one placement and leaves the fastest moving parts of a chart untouched.

Which is a reasonable way to end a birthday page. The sign is true, the degree and the face are more informative, and everything past that needs a time and a place rather than a calendar.

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