What this test is asking
Astrology has a technical layer and an interpretive one, and they get discussed as though they were the same thing. Whether a Saturn square means discipline or obstruction is an argument about tradition and taste. Whether Saturn can be square the Sun at all is a question with one answer, and it is settled by where Saturn is.
Everything on this page belongs to the second sort. You can verify each answer against an ephemeris, an almanac or a textbook on spherical astronomy, and most of them can be checked against calculators elsewhere on this site. If a question here feels ambiguous, that is a fault in how it was written rather than a sign of a genuine dispute.
That distinction is worth holding on to when you read anything about charts. A disagreement about symbolism can run for centuries without either side being wrong in a way that a measurement could settle. A disagreement about whether Mars was retrograde last April cannot, and if a source gets the second kind wrong there is little reason to trust it on the first.
The questions people find hardest
Two tend to catch experienced readers. The first is the elongation limit: because Mercury and Venus orbit inside Earth's, they can never appear far enough from the Sun to form a square or an opposition to it. A chart claiming Venus opposite the Sun has a bug in it, and it is worth knowing that before trusting anything else the same programme produced.
The second is the 173 day spacing of eclipse seasons. It looks like it ought to be six months, and the reason it is not is that the lunar nodes drift backwards while the Sun moves forwards. They meet slightly sooner than half a year, so eclipse dates walk steadily earlier through the calendar.
A third that catches people is the outer planet orbital periods. They are easy to look up and easy to forget, and they decide which returns a person can actually live through. A Saturn return arrives near twenty nine, a Uranus opposition near forty two, and a Neptune return arrives for nobody at all.
Vocabulary that is rarely defined
Words like combust, synodic, ayanamsa and ephemeris get used freely on astrology sites and defined almost nowhere. That matters more than it sounds, because a reader who does not know what an ayanamsa measures cannot tell why a sidereal chart puts their Sun in a different sign, and may conclude that one of the systems is broken when both are working exactly as designed.
Declination is the clearest case of a term going missing. It measures how far north or south of the celestial equator a body sits, and a chart wheel has no room for it because the wheel only draws ecliptic longitude. Two planets can therefore share a declination, called a parallel, while showing no aspect at all on the drawing in front of you.
After the test
Each explanation links to the page here that computes the thing it describes, so nothing rests on being taken at our word. The retrograde and eclipse pages carry real dates, the sidereal calculator names the ayanamsa it applies, and the Part of Fortune tool shows the day and night formulas separately rather than quietly picking one.
If you would rather start with the popular claims than the mechanics, the myths test covers those, and it shares none of these questions.
The technical layer is not the interesting part of astrology to most readers, and it is not meant to be. It is the part that determines whether the interesting layer is being built on accurate positions or on a rounding error, and that is worth fifteen questions.
Questions people ask about this
Can Venus really never oppose the Sun?
Correct, and the same holds for Mercury. Both orbit inside Earth's, so their greatest elongation from the Sun is about forty eight and twenty eight degrees respectively. They can form conjunctions, semi-sextiles and semi-squares to the Sun, and nothing wider.
Why does my sidereal chart put my Sun in a different sign?
Because the sidereal zodiac is anchored to the stars rather than to the March equinox, and the offset between the two, the ayanamsa, is currently around twenty four degrees. If your Sun sits in the first twenty four degrees of a tropical sign, sidereal places it in the previous one.
What is the difference between a parallel and a conjunction?
A conjunction is a match in ecliptic longitude, which is what the chart wheel draws. A parallel is a match in declination, meaning both bodies are the same distance north or south of the celestial equator. Tradition reads a parallel much like a conjunction, though nothing on the wheel shows it.
How many placements make a stellium?
There is no agreed number. Most writers use three or more bodies in one sign or one house, some insist on four, and some require that the Sun or Moon be among them. Because the definition varies, a tool should say which rule it applied rather than simply announcing that you have one.
Is a combust planet a bad placement?
Tradition treats combustion as a weakening, since the planet is lost in the Sun's glare, and treats cazimi, the very close conjunction, as a strengthening. Both are descriptions of visibility that classical authors read symbolically, and a modern reader who does not use dignity at all will simply record it as a tight conjunction.
Do I need a birth time for these answers?
Not for the test itself, which asks nothing about your own chart. Several of the linked calculators do need one, specifically the ascendant, the houses and the Part of Fortune, because all of them are measured from the horizon at your birth moment.