How Astrolo Reads the Sky

Astrology apps rarely tell you how they get their numbers. We would rather show our work. This page explains, in plain language, how Astrolo turns the sky on a given day into the scores and readings you see in the app.

Your chart, not just your sign

Your free daily energies are computed from your actual natal chart: your real rising sign, where every planet sat when you were born, and how today's sky touches those exact points. Two people with the same sun sign get different numbers because they have different charts. The horoscope sections in Astrolo Pro then explain those exact numbers, one section per energy, written from the same chart that produced them.

Whole sign houses

We use whole sign houses, the oldest house system in Western astrology. Each house is one full sign, counted from your rising sign: the sign rising when you were born is your first house, the next sign is your second, and so on around the wheel. It is simple, it never breaks down at extreme latitudes, and it is the system the earliest astrologers actually used. Every interpretation in Astrolo uses whole sign houses.

Day charts and night charts

Whether you were born during the day or at night changes how your chart reads. This is sect, a cornerstone of Hellenistic practice that most modern apps skip. In a day chart, Jupiter and Saturn work more smoothly while Mars bites harder; in a night chart, Venus and Mars are on your team and Saturn is the stricter one. Astrolo weighs Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn by the sect of your chart before they touch a single score.

What a daily score honestly is

Only the Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars move fast enough to change a daily number. The Moon covers about thirteen degrees a day; Saturn barely moves in a week. So our daily scores are driven by the fast planets, and the slow ones, Jupiter through Pluto, shape multi-week seasons instead. We show those as seasons with date ranges rather than pretending a planet that moves a fraction of a degree somehow changed your Tuesday.

Aspects and orbs

An aspect is a meaningful angle between two planets, and it matters more the closer it is to exact. We weight every aspect by that closeness: conjunctions get the widest allowance, sextiles the tightest, and the Sun and Moon get a little extra room, as tradition gives them. We also track direction. An applying aspect is still building toward exact, so its effect is ahead of you; a separating aspect has already delivered. The difference shows up in your numbers and in the reading.

Our sources

Our house meanings and interpretive rules follow the classical tradition: William Lilly, Vettius Valens, and modern Hellenistic scholarship. Where the tradition is unanimous we follow it exactly; where it is thin we say so in our own notes rather than inventing certainty.

Spot something we got wrong?

If you are a practising astrologer and you find something we got wrong, we genuinely want to hear about it. Write to us at hello@astrolo.io.