Painted Natal

Natal plates · 12 × 12 to 40 × 40 in

The sky at your first breath

Give us the date, the time on the clock and the town. We place the Sun, the Moon and seven planets for that minute, to the arcminute, and print the wheel with the clock you were born by beside it.

The Birth

Any town of 15,000 people or more, from GeoNames. For anywhere else, type the latitude and longitude, like 50.15, -5.07.

11:11 BST on the clock in Falmouth was UT 10:11. Offset applied: +1:00.

The example plate: a birth-chart wheel in gold on navy blue for the total eclipse over Falmouth, 11 August 1999, 11:11 BST, UT 10:11. The Sun and the Moon sit together at 18 degrees of Leo in the eleventh house, the Ascendant at 12 degrees of Libra, the Midheaven at 15 degrees of Cancer.

Every placement within 0.21′ of JPL Horizons How it's checked

Example: the total eclipse over Falmouth, Cornwall, 11 August 1999, 11:11 BST.
The Houses

Whole Sign starts each house at 0° of a sign, counting from the rising sign. Equal starts the first house at the Ascendant itself. Placidus isn't offered: its check against an outside source hasn't been run.

The Ground
The Ink

Gold and Silver are printed ink colours. No foil print has passed our printers' checks yet, so none is sold.

The Title

A name, usually. Left empty, the plate is titled with the date.

The Print
The Size
—plus shipping at cost

Payment through Stripe. Printed and shipped by Prodigi or Printful, whichever gets it to you for less.

Printed on purpose

The Clock You Were Born By

A chart is only as right as its time, and the time is where charts go wrong. A birth certificate gives the time on the town's clock; the sky needs Universal Time. Between the two sit the town's zone and its daylight saving rules for that year.

So the plate prints all of it on one line under the wheel: the clock time and the zone's name, the UT it became, the offset we applied, and the local sidereal time the houses were drawn from. Most charts hide the conversion. Ours shows the one number you'd want to check.

When the clocks went back, an hour happened twice, and the studio asks which. When they went forward, an hour never happened, and the studio says so instead of guessing.

The admission: before 1970, the time zone database's rules are reconstructed from the record, and for some towns they're wrong. If the certificate gives the zone or the UT, tick I have the time in UT and type it. The plate then says UT entered by hand.

The method

Positions, Not Readings

  1. 01

    The planets

    VSOP87D, the planetary theory of Pierre Bretagnon and Gérard Francou (1988), cut to the 2,978 terms that matter between 1800 and 2200.

  2. 02

    Where they appear

    Light-time, the FK5 correction, nutation and aberration, after Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (2nd ed., 1998).

  3. 03

    The Moon

    Meeus, chapter 47, with nutation, as implemented in Painted Skies, the sister shop that prints the night sky.

  4. 04

    The houses

    Sidereal time, the Ascendant and the Midheaven from the town's latitude and longitude, then Whole Sign or Equal houses, named on the plate.

The check, two ways

Every body is compared with JPL Horizons, the ephemeris service of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. First at eight named moments from 1930 to 2026, then at 2,263 more: one every 37 days, 7 hours and 1 minute from 1800 to 2030, a step that walks through the Moon's month and around the clock. The eight moments alone put the worst difference at 0.12′, the survey at 0.21′, and the plate prints the larger. The build fails if any body drifts past its allowance, and the allowances were fixed before the first comparison ran.

Worst difference from JPL Horizons, by body, in arcminutes
BodyWorst differenceAllowed
Sun0.011′0.5′
Moon0.203′1.0′
Mercury0.015′1.0′
Venus0.024′1.0′
Mars0.035′1.0′
Jupiter0.015′1.0′
Saturn0.021′1.0′
Uranus0.026′2.0′
Neptune0.047′2.0′

What the plate won't do is say what any of it means. It prints positions, houses under a named system, and aspects with their orbs: 8° when the Sun or the Moon is one of the pair, 6° otherwise. No sign is described and nothing is forecast. An astrologer can read it, and everything they'll ask for is on it.

Three more admissions. Pluto isn't on the wheel: no series for it ships here, and we don't make a position up. The wheel is cast from the Earth's centre, as charts are, so at the 1999 eclipse the Moon sits half a degree short of the Sun on the plate; seen from Falmouth, parallax closed the gap and the Sun went out. And the studio stops at 2030, because after it the clock correction used here and the one Horizons predicts drift apart, and the Moon drifts with them.

Credits

The family's other skies: Painted Zodiac draws the constellations of your sign, and Painted Heavens prints the stars over a night and a place.

Privacy, by construction

Where Your Birth Data Goes

Nowhere, until you order. The chart is placed in this tab, and the page keeps your choices after the # in its address, the part a browser never sends to a server.

WhatWhere it isHow long
The birth you enterIn this page's address, after the #Until you close the tab or clear the address. Never sent to us while you look.
The chart itselfPlaced in this tab, on this deviceNever stored.
The birth and your title, at checkoutSent to our server to draw the print, then kept as the drawn print fileFor as long as the print file is kept, as the privacy notice says.
Name, email and addressStripe at checkout, and the printer that makes itAs the privacy notice says. No cookies, no analytics.