Astrology has its own vocabulary, and AstroNoir uses the real thing. Here's every term you'll meet in your readings, explained simply. Skim it once and the rest of the Guide reads like your native language. Terms throughout the Guide link back here.
Chart basics
Natal Chart
The snapshot of the entire sky at your exact moment and place of birth, seen from Earth. It never changes — it's your fixed, lifelong chart, and the foundation every reading is built on.
Ascendant
Also called your Rising sign: the zodiac sign that was climbing over the eastern horizon at the moment you were born. It sets where all twelve houses fall and colours how you meet the world. It needs an accurate birth time.
Midheaven
The highest point of your chart (often abbreviated MC), tied to career, reputation, public role, and where you're headed in the world.
House
One of twelve slices of the chart, each governing a life area — self, money, communication, home, creativity, work, partnership, and so on — anchored to your ascendant.
Sun
Your core identity, will, and sense of self — the "you" everyone means by your star sign.
Moon
The fastest-moving body in your chart: your emotions, instincts, inner world, and the daily-to-weekly rhythm of your moods.
Aspects
Aspect
A meaningful geometric angle between two bodies that links their meanings — the grammar that turns separate placements into a story.
Conjunction
Two bodies at nearly the same point (0° apart) — their energies fuse and amplify each other.
Sextile
A 60° angle — easy, supportive opportunity that you have to actually reach for.
Square
A 90° angle — friction and tension that drives growth by forcing action.
Trine
A 120° angle — natural flow and talent, gifts that come easily.
Opposition
A 180° angle — a tug-of-war between two forces that need balancing, often playing out through other people.
Orb
How far from exact an aspect can be and still "count." A tighter orb means a stronger, more precise effect.
Chart strength
Dignity
How strong or "at home" a planet is in the sign it occupies — a planet in dignity acts with confidence and ease.
Sect
Whether you were born by day or by night. It's a day chart or a night chart, and it changes which planets are emphasized and how they behave.
Retrograde
When a planet appears to move backward from Earth's view. Retrograde placements turn their energy inward, reflective, and revisited rather than outward.
Timing techniques
Transit
Where a planet is right now compared to your natal chart. Transits are how the moving sky activates your fixed chart — the engine of day-to-day astrology.
Return
The moment a planet comes back to the exact spot it held at your birth, starting a fresh cycle for that planet.
Solar Return
Your "birthday chart" — the sky at the instant the Sun returns to its natal degree each year, read as the theme of your year ahead.
Lunar Return
The monthly chart cast when the Moon comes back to its birth position — the emotional theme of the month.
Lunar Phase
The Moon's cycle from new to full and back. New moons favour beginnings; full moons bring things to a head and release. AstroNoir personalizes this to your natal Moon — see the Lunar Horoscope.
Progression
A symbolic, slow-motion unfolding of your chart over your lifetime (technically secondary progressions: one day after birth = one year of life). It tracks who you're quietly becoming.
Solar Arc
A directing technique that advances your whole chart at roughly one degree per year of life, pinpointing the timing of big changes.
Profection
A traditional yearly technique: each year of your life "activates" a different house and its ruling planet, spotlighting where the action is. Pairs with the Lord of the Year.
Lord of the Year
The planet that rules your profected house for the current year — your time-lord, the planet running the show for these twelve months.
Eclipse
A supercharged new or full Moon. When an eclipse lands on a sensitive point in your chart, it tends to mark turning points and accelerated change.
Points & bodies
Node
The two points (North and South) where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's — the karmic axis of the chart.
North Node
The direction of growth — the qualities and experiences your life is pulling you toward. Central to Karmic Debts.
South Node
What you arrive already carrying — comfortable, habitual patterns from behind you that you're meant to grow beyond.
Asteroid
A minor body beyond the main planets. AstroNoir tracks 140+ of them for the texture and specificity the big planets miss — see The Moon, the Planets & 140+ Asteroids.
Chiron
The "wounded healer" — the asteroid marking a deep, tender wound and the wisdom and healing gift that grows from it.
Lilith
The Black Moon — raw, untamed, instinctive desire and the parts of you that refuse to be domesticated.
Vertex
A sensitive point associated with fated encounters and turning-point meetings — the "it was meant to happen" axis.
Part of Fortune
The best-known of the Arabic Lots: a calculated point of ease, flow, and where worldly good fortune comes naturally.
Arabic Lots
Also called Parts — calculated points (around 50 of them) derived from the positions of other bodies, each highlighting a specific theme like fortune, spirit, love, or death.
Advanced charts
Draconic
A second version of your chart cast from the lunar nodes — read as your "soul" chart, the deeper intention beneath the personality.
Firdaria
A Persian time-lord system that divides life into planetary periods across roughly 75 years, with different day and night sequences — a map of which planet governs each chapter.
Zodiacal Releasing
A Hellenistic timing technique that breaks your life into chapters and sub-chapters, flagging peak periods and major turning points.
Composite Chart
A single "relationship chart" built from the midpoints between two people's charts — the relationship treated as its own entity.
Davison
The Davison chart: a real chart cast for the exact midpoint in time and space between two birth moments — another way to read a relationship as one thing.
Synastry
The side-by-side comparison of two people's charts — how each person's planets touch the other's. The astrology of compatibility.
Horary
The oldest predictive art: a chart cast for the exact moment a specific question is asked, read to answer that question.
Systems
Ephemeris
A precise table of where every body sits in the sky over time. AstroNoir uses the Swiss Ephemeris, the professional standard, accurate to a fraction of an arcsecond.
Tropical Zodiac
The zodiac anchored to the seasons and the equinoxes, standard in Western astrology. It's what AstroNoir uses, consistently, everywhere.
Sidereal
An alternative zodiac anchored to the fixed stars rather than the seasons, used mainly in Vedic astrology. AstroNoir does not use it — we're tropical-only by design.
BaZi
Chinese "Four Pillars" astrology — your year, month, day, and hour pillars and their elemental balance. The backbone of the Chinese Horoscope.
Day Master
In BaZi, the heavenly stem of your day pillar — the elemental "self" at the centre of your Chinese chart, the anchor every other pillar is read against.
Didn't find a term? It probably lives inside one of the module pages — or ask the AI astrologer, which can explain anything in your own chart in plain language.