Astrolium ships three predictive surfaces, and they answer different questions. The transit scanner asks "show me every client in my roster with Saturn within 1° of an angle in the next 90 days." The predictive timing ribbon stacks profections, zodiacal releasing, and transits into one chronological view for one client. Transits, the feature on this page, is the day-to-day per-client transit reading: open a chart, scrub to a date, read the wheel. If you only want one of the three, this is the one you open most often.
The free chart generator casts a natal that drops straight into the transit view. The how-to-read-a-natal-chart guide covers the reading order the transit overlay layers onto. For the $29 per month Pro plan, see pricing.
What a working transit view actually needs
The reading practitioners do every day isn't "what's transiting right now." It's "what's perfecting around 14 March, when she's flying back from her father's funeral." The question is always anchored to a date, and the date is rarely today. Static transit reports from Solar Fire give you a printout that expires the moment the client reschedules. The scrubber gives you the same printout for any date in the next century, regenerated in 90 ms.
The second thing the static report hides is the orb-by-day decay. A Saturn square Sun isn't a moment, it's a 9-month window with three or five exact passes depending on retrograde geometry. Reading by the perfection date alone misses the entering orb (when the client first feels it) and the leaving orb (when the structural pressure releases). The scrubber walks the window day by day.
The four layers on the wheel
Layer 1 — the transit ring itself
The outer ring of the wheel holds the transiting bodies for whatever date the scrubber sits on. All 10 traditional + 6 modern bodies are on by default: Sun through Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, plus Chiron, Lilith, the North Node, and the Lot of Fortune. Toggle the asteroid layer to add Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, or any of the 20,000 named bodies. The transit ring re-renders every time you drag the scrubber, so a six-month walk through the timeline animates the outer planets crawling through the houses while the personal planets spin.
Layer 2 — the aspect lines
Every aspect from a transiting body to a natal point draws as a line on the wheel. Line weight follows orb tightness, so a Saturn square Sun at 0.2° dominates a Jupiter trine Mercury at 4°. The full Ptolemaic set plus quincunx is on by default. Toggle the quintile family, septile family, or the harmonic-9 set per chart if your school uses them. Bonatti's interpretation of partile contacts (within 1° within the same sign) gets its own line color, so the dignity of aspect is visible without hovering for a tooltip.
Layer 3 — the retrograde markers
Every planetary station between the scrubber's date and date + 365 days surfaces on the timeline as a small inverted triangle. Saturn retrograde 2026 stations on 12 June at 2°56' Pisces and turns direct on 28 October at 24°08' Aquarius. Both stations show up as triangles on the Saturn track. Click either marker and the wheel locks to that date with Saturn at the station degree. Brady's predictive astrology framework treats stations as the dates when transits "speak loudest"; the marker layer surfaces them without an ephemeris in the other hand.
Layer 4 — the multi-wheel overlay
The wheel is a stack, not a fixed pair. Default is natal (inner) + transit (outer). Toggle the progressed chart in as a third ring. Or solar return as the third ring. Or synastry partner's transits if a couple is in session together. Three layers on one ring with color-coded aspect lines: blue from natal, green from transit, red from progressed. The reading Hand describes in Planets in Transit (checking the transit against the secondary progressed Moon) works on one screen instead of two open windows.
A worked example: Saturn square Sun, March 2026
A 38-year-old client comes in for her second Saturn return reading. Her natal Sun sits at 17° Sagittarius, in the 6th house. Saturn is currently at 14° Pisces, applying to the square. The session is on 14 March 2026.
Open the client's chart. Scrubber starts at today, 13 May 2026. Drag back to 1 March. The wheel shows Saturn at 12° Pisces, in the applying degrees of the square. The aspect line glows because the orb is 5° and tightening. Drag forward to 14 March, the actual perfection date. Saturn lands at 17° Pisces, the line goes bright. The wheel header reads: "Saturn square Sun, exact at 12:18 UTC, orb 0.0°."
Scroll the timeline panel. The next two perfections are flagged: 23 July (Saturn retrograde, second pass) and 5 November (Saturn direct, third pass). The bracket between 1 March and 5 November is the structural window: 8 months of Saturn pressure on her Sun. That's the reading you have to give her, not "Saturn squares your Sun in March."
Greene's psychological synthesis would read the 6th house Sun under Saturn as a body-and-routine reset, a daily-life reorganization rather than a public crisis. The timeline shows you the structure; the predictive timing ribbon shows you what else is layered (her Aquarius profected year, her ZR Capricorn sub-period). Together, the two views answer the question she actually came in with: "Why does the next nine months feel like a wall?"
What this replaces
A practitioner today usually checks transits across three tools:
- Solar Fire's transit window — strong reference, no scrubber, retrograde stations buried in the bi-wheel print options, no progressed overlay without opening a second chart.
- Astro Gold or TimePassages — single transit table per date, no timeline walk, mobile interface that re-flows on every orientation change.
- An ephemeris in the other hand — Michelsen or Rosicrucian, paper or PDF, for the dates the desktop tool gets wrong on retrograde geometry.
Astrolium collapses the three into one tab. The scrubber is the ephemeris. The wheel is the transit chart. The PDF export is the printout. The retrograde station markers replace the ephemeris-flipping. Same Swiss Ephemeris core Solar Fire uses, with the visual scrubber on top.
Where it sits in the predictive stack
Three Astrolium features touch transits, and the distinction matters when you're picking which one to open:
- Transits (this feature) — per-client, single chart, scrubber-driven. The session-prep view. Opens 5-10× per day for a working practitioner.
- Transit scanner — roster-wide, query-driven. The triage view. Opens once a morning for the Monday outreach list.
- Predictive timing — single-client, layered (profections + ZR + transits). The synthesis view. Opens once per session to set the macro context.
The three share one Swiss Ephemeris engine and one client roster. A chart cast in the chart generator lands in any of the three views with no re-entry. The transit reading you take to a session on Tuesday is the same chart the scanner flagged on Monday, on the same ribbon the synthesis view shows for the year.
Brady, Greene, Hand: the working references
The three modern references Astrolium tested the transit view against:
- Hand's Planets in Transit — still the standard daily-transit reference 50 years on. The book's structural insight (a transit is a window, not a date) is what the scrubber operationalizes. Hand reads transits against the secondary progressed Moon for emotional dating; the overlay layer puts the progressed Moon on the same wheel.
- Greene's psychological synthesis — transits as developmental pressure rather than event-prediction. The 6th-house Saturn example above is Greene's framing. The PDF export interpretation tier (Pro and Business) ships with prose that reads in that register, not "Saturn squares your Sun, you will have a bad day."
- Brady's predictive astrology — stations as the loudest dates, fixed stars layered onto transit positions, the parans algorithm. The Robson 49-star and Brady 115-star layers from the natal chart feature carry into the transit view. A transiting Mars conjunct Regulus surfaces as a Brady paran on the same wheel.
Three reference works, one engine, one scrubber. The structural reading they each describe is what the transit view is built to render.
Pricing
The transit view is free in Lite for the next 365 days at any moment in time. Pro at $29 per month opens the full 1900-2100 scrubber, the multi-wheel overlay, retrograde station markers across the whole window, and unbranded PDF export. Business at $99 per month adds white-label PDF export with practitioner branding, expiring shareable links for client deliverables, and the 2-seat shared roster. The founding-member rate of $14.50 per month for life includes Pro. See pricing for the full breakdown.
Continue exploring
- Transit scanner — roster-wide transit queries
- Predictive timing — profections + ZR + transits on one ribbon
- Natal chart — the wheel the transit ring overlays onto
- Saturn return calculator — free preview of the per-client return window
- Saturn return guide — the reading method for the most-asked-about transit
- How to read a natal chart — the reading order the transit layer attaches to