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 $11 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 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 second thing the static report hides is the shape of the window. A Saturn square Sun isn't a moment. It's a stretch of months with three or five exact passes depending on retrograde geometry. Reading by the perfection date alone misses when the client first feels it and when the pressure releases.
The time navigator
The transit view used to be an undifferentiated row of dots you dragged along. That is gone. What replaced it works at two levels, because the two questions practitioners ask are at two scales.
The year overview is the top level: one cached band showing where the exact passes cluster and where the activation windows sit across the year. You read it the way you read a calendar, for shape rather than detail.
The focus window is the bottom level. Set it to 14 days when you are prepping a session, 3 months when you are reading a phase, or 1 year when a client asks what the year holds. Previous pass and Next pass step through the contacts; a separate control steps only through the slow ones when Mercury and Venus are cluttering the picture. Dragging commits on release, so the wheel does not thrash while you are still deciding where to land.
Activation windows are the part worth trusting. Their bounds come from the calculation, not from splitting the difference between two adjacent exact dates, which is what most software does and never admits. A window cut off at the edge of the scan is labelled as truncated rather than quietly reported as shorter than it is. When there are no activations in the range, the panel says so instead of showing an empty chart you have to interpret.
Reading orbs your way
Orbs start from your school preset and take overrides from there. The per-body popover sets a conjunction orb for each transiting body, so Pluto can run wide while the Moon runs tight, and one toggle mutes the nodes and Lilith when they are crowding the active-aspects list. Reset to defaults puts you back on the standard curve, tight on the luminaries and wider on the outers.
Those settings are stored with your account rather than in one browser's local storage, so the orbs you tuned on the desktop are the orbs you get on the laptop.
Asking about one row
Ask AI buttons sit on the surfaces where questions actually come up: the activation card, the house-opportunities panel, an individual aspect row, and the time navigator itself. Each one sends that row's computed evidence rather than a vague prompt, so the answer is about the transit in front of you.
From a selected aspect the detail bar also offers Draft outreach, which turns the contact into a message to the client, and Watch across roster, which creates a standing alert that checks every client for the same transit. See Sky for what happens after the button.
The four layers on the wheel
Layer 1 — the transit ring itself
The outer ring of the wheel holds the transiting bodies for the selected date. Sun through Pluto plus Chiron, Black Moon Lilith, and the North Node are available, grouped as lights, personal, social, and outer so you can switch a whole band off at once. The six curated asteroid points (Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Eros, Psyche) come from your global chart-point selection rather than a per-view toggle. Move the selected date and the ring re-renders, so a six-month walk 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
Retrograde motion is marked on the passes themselves, so a contact that perfects on a retrograde pass is labelled as one. Saturn retrograde 2026 stations on 12 June at 2°56' Pisces and turns direct on 28 October at 24°08' Aquarius; the contacts either side of those stations read as numbered passes inside one activation window rather than as three unrelated dates. Brady's predictive framework treats stations as the dates when transits speak loudest, and the pass numbering is what makes them findable without an ephemeris in your other hand.
Layer 4 — the multi-wheel overlay
The wheel is a stack, not a fixed pair. Default is natal (inner) plus transit (outer). Toggle the progressed chart in as a third ring, or the solar return, or a partner's chart if a couple is in session together. Aspect lines are colour-coded by the ring they come from. The reading Hand describes in Planets in Transit, checking a 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. The year overview already shows a dense band across the spring. Drop the focus window to 3 months and the Saturn contact resolves into one activation window with its passes numbered. Move to 1 March: Saturn at 12° Pisces, applying, the aspect line lit because the orb is 5° and tightening. Move to 14 March and the line goes bright, with the detail bar reading exact, 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 navigable timeline, 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 navigator is the ephemeris. The wheel is the transit chart. Report Studio is the printout. Numbered passes inside one activation window replace the ephemeris-flipping. Same Swiss Ephemeris core Solar Fire uses, with the navigator 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, navigator-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, that a transit is a window rather than a date, is what the activation windows put on screen. 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 Master) 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 navigator. The structural reading they each describe is what the transit view is built to render.
Pricing
The transit view is free. Pro at $11 per month raises the roster from 5 clients to 25 and adds the multi-wheel overlay, Sky, Report Studio, and reviewed chart links. Master at $79 adds full white-label deliverables across up to three brand profiles and the 3-seat shared roster. 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