The Sun
Your core motive and the direction you grow in. It changes sign once a month.
What a sun sign actually means
Your sun sign is the zodiac sign the Sun stood in on the day you were born, and it is the single piece of astrology almost everyone knows about themselves. It describes your core motive, the direction you grow in and the kind of life that feels like yours rather than borrowed. It is also one placement out of dozens.
Set by your birth dateOne third of the big three
The big three
The big three and what each part answers
Reading only your sun sign is like describing a person by their job title, true as far as it goes and thin everywhere else. The big three answers three different questions. The Sun says what you are becoming. The Moon says what you need in private. The rising sign says how you meet the world.
The Moon
What you need in private, and what comfort means when you are tired or finally safe.
The rising sign
How you meet the world. It turns over about every two hours, so one birthday holds many.
The big three in full
People who insist astrology never describes them have usually met only their Sun; with the other two placements the portrait starts sounding like a person with contradictions, which is what everybody is.
How to find it
How to find your sun sign
Ten seconds with the dates table
The birth date on the dates table gives the sun sign straight away.
One minute with the chart
Born within two days of a boundary, the table stops being reliable. The Sun changes sign at an hour that moves from year to year, and the chart answers from your city and time without guessing.
The twelve
All twelve sun signs
Questions
Asked most often about sun signs.
Can my sun sign change?
No. The sky at your birth is a fixed fact and nothing rewrites it, not a new zodiac headline, not a birthday spent in another country. What can change is the answer you were given, if someone read a rounded table instead of calculating your chart. That is a correction of a mistake, not a change of your sign.
What about the thirteenth sign I keep reading about?
Ophiuchus is a real constellation that the Sun does pass through, and it has never been part of the tropical zodiac used in Western astrology. That zodiac divides the year by the seasons into twelve equal parts, and it has not matched the constellations for about two thousand years. Nothing new has been discovered, and your sign has not moved.
Why does my sun sign description not fit me at all?
Usually because your rising sign or your Moon is loud enough to run the front of your personality, and those are what other people describe when they describe you. It also happens when a description is written as a compliment rather than a portrait. Read your whole big three before you decide astrology has nothing to say about you.
Where next
Add your Moon and your rising sign
A description that misses you completely usually means your rising sign or your Moon is doing the talking. Both live in the same chart, and both take one calculation to find.
Calculate your birth chartAll twelve signsMake your Soul Card
Read here as a language of symbols. Medical, legal and financial questions belong with a professional.