Birth data for a horoscope: where the time comes from

A birth chart needs three details: the day, the time, the place. The day is on every identity document, and so is the place. The time, by contrast, is the detail most people come unstuck on – and it is precisely the most delicate of the three.

Where the time of birth is actually recorded

A widespread error: on the birth certificate. The ordinary German short certificate names the day and the place of birth, and as a rule not the time. The time is held in the register of births kept by the Standesamt, the registry office for the place of birth. Anyone who needs it in black and white applies there for a full copy of the record.

Alongside that there are the softer sources: the family record book, papers from the maternity hospital, a congratulations card with the time on it, a parent’s diary entry. And memory – “shortly after breakfast”. That is worth more than nothing, but it is not a time.

Why rounded minutes are a problem

A great many recorded birth times end in a nought or a five. In the delivery room no one is timing anything to the second; what gets written down is roughly what the clock on the wall showed. That is exactly where the blur enters, the blur that everything is later calculated with.

It makes itself felt wherever the daily rotation has a part to play. Depending on the sign and on the geographical latitude, in an hour the rising point on the eastern horizon covers sometimes a little over half a sign, sometimes considerably more; a quarter of an hour of uncertainty therefore shifts every one of the house cusps, and close to a change of sign it decides which sign is on the ascendant.

The trap is called daylight saving time

What is recorded is the legal time that applied at the place of birth, not solar time. The conversion is done by the program – but only if you give it the right data. In Germany daylight saving time ran from 1916 to 1918 and then again from 1940 to 1949; after that it did not run for three decades, and only since 1980 has it been in force without a break. Anyone calculating a chart for a birth before 1980 looks up the rule for the year in question instead of assuming it.

Convert nothing yourself. Enter the time recorded in the register, along with the date and the place; the time zone follows from that. Anyone who puts the clock back another hour “to be on the safe side” builds in exactly the error they wanted to avoid.

The place is less critical than many think

What is needed are the coordinates of the place of birth, not those of the home address at the time. Within a city the district makes next to no difference: one minute of time corresponds to a quarter of a degree of geographical longitude, which at our latitudes means a good fifteen kilometres east to west. The place becomes important only for countries with several time zones and in border regions.

Calculating without a birth time

If it is missing altogether, programs usually set twelve noon. That is a convention and not a solution: what comes out is a picture hanging in the middle of the day, and no one should take its houses seriously.

Two things are worth knowing here. The Moon covers some twelve to fifteen degrees a day and can change sign within a single day. And even the Sun is not settled in every case: anyone born on a day on which it changes sign needs the time even for the simplest piece of information of all. The horoscopes show how clean data then become a picture that can be read; the planets set out what is worked with in doing so.

Correcting the birth time, with care

There is a procedure that works back from known events in a life to the time of birth: rectification. It is practised, and within astrology it is disputed, because the result depends on which events are selected and which technique is followed. Two experts rarely arrive at the same minute. Treat a picture obtained in that way as a working basis, not as a fact.