A birth chart is a picture of the sky taken at one moment, from one spot on Earth. The moment is your birth and the spot is the town where it happened. Astrologers read that picture slowly, a piece at a time, and that's how this course goes too. By the end you'll be able to sit down with a chart, yours or a friend's, and say something real about it.
Go outside on a clear night and the Moon and a few bright planets hang in the sky along roughly the same path. That path is the band the Sun seems to travel through over a year. Astrologers divide it into twelve equal slices and call them the signs: Aries, Taurus, Gemini and the rest.
At the minute you were born, every planet was sitting in one of those slices. The Sun was in one sign, the Moon in another, Venus somewhere else. A birth chart writes all of that down.
It also records where the horizon was. From where you were born, some part of the sky was coming up in the east at that minute. That rising point is the reason two babies born on the same day in different cities, or three hours apart in the same hospital, get different charts. We'll spend lessons 4 and 5 on it.
Most charts are drawn as a wheel cut into twelve pieces, with little symbols for the planets. It looks busy the first time. Once you know what the symbols are, it's just a list you can read in a circle.
Three things: the date you were born, the time, and the place. The date and place are easy for most people. The time is the one that trips people up.
Time matters because parts of the chart move fast. The Moon changes sign about every two and a half days, so on some birthdays it switched signs partway through. The rising sign changes roughly every two hours, and the houses (lesson 4) hang off it. A guess of "sometime in the morning" can put you in the wrong house entirely.
Good places to look for the time: a birth certificate (in many places the long version lists it), a hospital record, a baby book, or a parent who remembers because it was 3 am and they were very awake. If you can't find it, you can still do most of this course. Planets and signs (lessons 1 to 3) and aspects (lesson 6) work fine with the date alone. You'll just have to hold the houses loosely.
On My Stella you can enter your birth details and get your chart in a minute. Keep it open in another tab while you read, because every lesson ends with a small job to do on your own chart.
Any chart program will do, as long as you know two settings. This course uses the tropical zodiac, which is the usual one in Western astrology, and whole-sign houses, which we'll explain in lesson 4. If another site gives you slightly different houses, that setting is almost always why. Lesson 11 covers the other zodiac, the one used in Vedic astrology.
We need one chart to practice on, so we made one up. Maya isn't a real person, but her chart is real in the sense that matters: it's the actual sky over Chicago at 7:40 in the morning on March 14, 1996, worked out properly.
Every lesson reads Maya's chart a little further. In lesson 1 we list her planets. In lesson 3 we write our first real sentences about her. By lesson 8 we read her whole chart from start to finish, the way a good reading would, and you'll have done every step of it yourself.
Using one person the whole way through is on purpose. Reading a chart is mostly about how the pieces lean on each other, and you can't see that if the example changes every page.
Nearly everything in a chart answers one of three questions.
Here's one piece of Maya's chart to show how they fit. Her Venus is in Taurus, in her first house. Venus is the what: love, and what she finds beautiful. Taurus is the how: slowly, through the senses, and loyally once she's decided. The first house is the where: it shows up in how she comes across to people.
That one line will make a lot more sense by lesson 5. For now it's enough to see that a chart is a set of small, answerable pieces. Lesson 3 is where you learn to join the first two into a sentence, and the rest of the course builds on that.