How Long Does a Rising Sign Last?

Rising time for all 12 signs

Download all 36 intervals, with coordinates, local times and UTC times (CSV)

You may freely reproduce this table and dataset in lessons, newsletters and articles. Please credit The Rising and include the study date.

How we measured a rising sign

We calculated the tropical ascendant once per UTC minute from November 4 through November 6 using Swiss Ephemeris 2.10.03. For each city, we kept every full sign interval that started on November 5 in local time, including intervals ending the following morning.

The first sampled minute of the new sign marks the start. The first minute of the next sign marks the exclusive end. Each city’s twelve intervals add up to 1,436 minutes, about the time Earth takes to rotate once relative to the stars.

To reproduce the results, use each CSV row’s coordinates and Gregorian Julian day in UT. Call houses_ex with tropical settings and Placidus houses. Divide the ascendant longitude in degrees (the first returned angle) by 30 and take the whole number, counting Aries as zero.

We checked all 72 start and end times against The Rising’s calculator. Both methods put every boundary in the same sampled minute. A separate sub-minute calculation placed each reported duration within one minute of the finer estimate.

Swiss Ephemeris programmer’s manual

Why rising signs move at different speeds

The zodiac follows the ecliptic, the Sun’s apparent path against the stars. Your local horizon meets that path at an angle that depends on your latitude. As Earth rotates, each 30-degree sign takes a different amount of time to cross the eastern horizon.

Singapore is close to the equator. Its shortest and longest intervals in this study were 110 and 128 minutes. In Stockholm, farther north, they ranged from 32 to 192 minutes. In Cape Town, south of the equator, the pattern changes again. Virgo took 81 minutes there and 191 minutes in Stockholm.

What if your recorded time is approximate?

In Stockholm, Pisces first appeared in our samples at 14:17 local time and Aries at 14:49. A time recorded as 14:45, plus or minus ten minutes, allows either sign. At the same coordinates, a window from 14:25 to 14:35 stays inside Pisces.

Use the date and city of birth to check your own interval. These three examples measure how long a sign occupied the horizon. To estimate how common a rising sign is among people, you would also need the distribution of actual births across places and times.