What is a horoscope?

You’re standing in a beautiful park full of flowers and trees and take a photograph of this lustrous panorama. Sometime later, you take the photo to hand and must imagine how the park looked in its actual breadth and depth. The photo is flat – two-dimensional – but the park fills space – it is three-dimensional.

This is a good description of a horoscope: It is a two-dimensional map of the three-dimensional sky.

The sun appears to circle around the earth.

Fig. 1

When we look into the evening sky, we can observe the planets, which are arranged in an arc across the heavens. The planets are always near the path of the sun.

Fig. 2

A horoscope depicts the sun’s path as a circle divided into 12 segments. A constellation of stars is assigned to each segment.

Fig. 3

Since most of these constellations depict animals or mythological creatures, this circle has come to be called the “zodiac”, derived from the Greek word for animal or life (zōion). Each of the segments is called a “sign”. We can see only the part of the zodiac that reaches from the eastern to the western horizon.

Fig. 4

However, a horoscope depicts the entire zodiac. The following horoscope shows the zodiac, the sun, the moon, and the five visible planets, as they can be seen in Fig. 4, as well as the rest of the zodiac that we cannot see.

Fig. 5

Each planet is represented by a symbol. In the horoscope, each of the planets is placed in the zodiac position corresponding to its location in the sky.

Astrology is based on what we can see from our position on the Earth. We know that the Earth moves around the sun, not the other way around, but astrology is based on what we humans perceive. A horoscope depicts the sky as we see it. Your natal horoscope depicts the position of the planets as they were at the exact time of your birth and is unique.

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Fig. 1 – 4: Horoskopus v. 1.2.1

Fig. 5: Astrocontact Astroplus, V. 21.0.0; 1.2025