Relocation or Relocated Charts in Astrology
How to Correctly Relocate a Natal Chart
Your natal chart works just fine for most purposes whether or not you still live where you were born. Still, a relocation chart is interesting to study if you’ve permanently moved away from your birth place or if you want to see possible changes to your natal chart in a new place.
Frequently, I have seen people use their birth data—including their local birth time—and simply change their birthplace to their new location, creating what they thought was a relocation chart. This approach will not work if the new location is in a different time zone. I emphasize this because this method will produce a chart that has no relevance to the owner–the resulting chart is not an accurate relocation chart.
The reason for this is that the relocation chart should preserve the true moment in time that your birth occurred.
For example, take someone born at noon in Toronto under Eastern Standard Time:
The correct relocation chart to London, England would be as follows (many astrology software programs will calculate this for you):
If we were to simply change the birth location to London, England without changing the birth time, we would produce the following chart, which would be INCORRECT. Please note that this is effectively a chart for a person born 5 hours earlier than the person in the example and yields different (earlier) planetary positions, which has no relevance to the person and is incorrect:
However, if we wanted to manually create the relocated chart to London correctly, we would need to convert the actual birth time to the London, England zone (add 5 hours in this case) AND use the London, England birthplace to arrive at the following correct relocation chart:
In sum, if you’re relocating a chart manually, it’s important to convert the birthtime to the new location’s time zone to preserve the moment in time of the birth. You always want to create a chart for the person for the same moment in time but in a different place–otherwise, the chart would have no relevance to its owner. In the above example, when it was 12 PM in Toronto, it was 5 PM in London–the same moment in time but in a different location.
Note: you could also convert the birth time to GMT or UT and get the same results. Most software programs do this for you.
Note also that the planetary positions in your relocated charts should be identical to those in your natal chart, but the angles (house cusps, Ascendant, and Midheaven) will have changed. If you see a different position for your Moon, for example, which is most sensitive to time changes, you’ll know that the relocation chart is not correct.
The Horizons Report is available for purchase and interprets relocation charts.
See Also:
Best Times for Business Success, Good Luck, and Romance & Sexuality
