CrescentWhat the sky is doing now.
The planets never stop moving. This is where today's sky meets your birth chart, the days it favours you, and the events lighting up the sky for everyone.
Sky events · next 30 days
These happen in the sky for everyone: a planet turning retrograde, changing signs, or a new and full Moon.
What a transit is
A transit is the angle between where a planet is today and where a planet was at your birth. Your natal chart never changes. The sky keeps moving. A transit is the meeting of those two, which is why a transit reading needs your birth time and a horoscope column does not.
This is the practical difference between the two. A daily horoscope is written once for everyone born across a whole month. A transit is computed for your chart alone, so two people with the same Sun sign will usually have nothing in common here.
Fast and slow, and why it matters
The Moon moves through the entire zodiac in about 28 days and changes sign every two and a half days, so lunar transits are weather: real, but gone by tomorrow. Mercury, Venus and Mars are measured in weeks to months.
Jupiter takes roughly twelve years to return to where it started, Saturn about twenty nine and a half, and the outer planets far longer. When people describe a period of their life as a chapter rather than a mood, they are almost always describing a slow transit. Crescent separates them for this reason: mixing a two day Moon transit into the same list as a two year Saturn transit makes both unreadable.
Orbs, and why a transit is not a date
Aspects are not instantaneous. A transit comes into range, becomes exact, then separates, and the whole passage is the transit. The window is called an orb. Retrograde motion complicates it further: an outer planet can make the same aspect three times over many months as it stations and turns. Treating a transit as a single calendar date is the most common way to misread one.
Western and Vedic
Crescent computes transits in both systems, and they will not agree on sign placements, because the tropical zodiac is anchored to the seasons and the sidereal zodiac to the constellations. The two have drifted roughly 24 degrees apart. Neither is a mistake. The core concepts glossary explains the split, and aspects and drishti covers how the two traditions measure the angles differently.