The heliocentric chart computes planetary positions from the Sun's frame, with Earth replacing the Sun in the planetary table. The Moon and lunar nodes have no meaning here and are omitted by design. Mercury and Venus are never retrograde because retrograde motion is an Earth-observer artifact. The chart describes the planetary cycles as physics sees them.
What changes from the geocentric chart
Four things. Earth replaces the Sun in the planet list. The Moon and lunar nodes are omitted. Mercury and Venus are never retrograde. Houses are absent because there is no observer-frame to compute them against. The aspect grid still works because aspects are angles between bodies and do not depend on the observer.
Outer planets (Jupiter through Pluto) sit at almost the same longitude as in the geocentric chart, within 0-1°, because their distance from Earth is small compared to their distance from the Sun. Mars varies by up to a degree. Mercury and Venus can shift by tens of degrees because Earth is close in scale to their orbits.
When practitioners reach for it
Mundane astrology and financial astrology use heliocentric data routinely. The argument: long-cycle planetary patterns are physical, not perceptual, and the Sun-centered chart matches the underlying mechanism more cleanly. Theodor Landscheidt's solar activity work used heliocentric Jupiter-Saturn cycles. Donald Bradley's siderograph (1948) charted heliocentric Mars-Saturn aspects against the Dow.
For natal work, heliocentric is rare and contested. Some practitioners use the natal heliocentric Mercury position alongside the geocentric to disambiguate communication style; others reject this as overreach. The cleaner case is mundane: cycles, market timing, weather, large-scale collective events.
Earth as a placement
Earth's heliocentric longitude is always the natal Sun's exact opposite. If the natal Sun is at 5° Cancer (95°), heliocentric Earth is at 5° Capricorn (275°). The Earth-in-sign reading is sometimes treated as the soul-as-seen-from-the-Sun, an inverted Sun-sign reading. Most working practitioners treat it as the same information rotated by 180° and do not assign it a separate meaning.
What does have meaning: the heliocentric distance from Earth to each outer planet, which Astrolium returns as distance_au in the data. Distance is a cycle indicator independent of longitude, used in mundane work to track when an outer planet is near aphelion (slow) or perihelion (fast).
The Sun, Moon, and nodes — explicitly omitted
The Sun is the frame origin and has no longitude in its own frame. The Moon orbits Earth, not the Sun, and its heliocentric position is meaningless for astrological purposes (it is essentially Earth's position with a small lunar-orbit perturbation). The lunar nodes are intersections of the Moon's orbit with the ecliptic; they too are Earth-frame artifacts. Astrolium's heliocentric endpoint omits all three explicitly, with a metadata block listing what was excluded.
For the conventional Earth-frame chart, see the free birth chart calculator. For the local-observer frame in horizon coordinates, see the local space calculator. For mundane cycle work, see the transit report calculator.