By Dorian Grimault, astrologer · Published · updated
Fixed stars are the distant stars of our galaxy, as opposed to the planets that wander through the zodiac. Since Antiquity, astrologers have read the ones lying along the path of the Sun when they exactly touch a planet or an angle of the chart. AstralPro watches nine of them, including the four so-called royal stars, and retains only one configuration: the tight conjunction. If none is detected, your report does not mention them at all.
They are called fixed because they keep the same arrangement relative to one another from one century to the next, whereas the planets change place every day. The Babylonians already used them as landmarks, and Ptolemy catalogued more than a thousand of them in the Almagest, in the 2nd century.
Yet in the tropical zodiac used by Western astrology, they move forward slowly: about 1° every 72 years. This is the effect of the precession of the equinoxes, the slow wobble of the Earth's axis. Regulus, for example, left Leo and entered Virgo around 2011-2012. The position of a star in a chart is therefore that of the year of birth, and the same conjunction can exist for one generation and disappear for the next.
Another technical point: some stars lie far from the ecliptic. Vega, for example, shines far to the north of the Sun's path. Astrology projects it onto the ecliptic and keeps only its longitude, that is, its degree in the zodiac. It is this degree that is compared with that of your planets and angles.
The tradition reads dozens of them. AstralPro keeps nine, among the brightest or most commented on, each with a short meaning used in the report:
The name royal stars refers to a tradition described as Persian by modern authors: Richard Hinckley Allen (Star Names, 1899), following Dupuis and Flammarion, speaks of the four guardians of the sky of Persia, each linked to a direction, and it is Flammarion who identifies them with these four stars. The ancient origin of this tradition remains poorly documented. Their promise is said to be great, and always comes with a condition: this is why their reading combines a promise and a warning.
A fixed star does not form a square or a trine in AstralPro's practice: only the conjunction counts, and it has to be tight. The orbs follow the traditional hierarchy (angles slightly wider than planets, royal stars slightly wider than the others), with deliberately narrow values:
Nine points are tested: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Ascendant (AC), the Midheaven (MC), the Descendant (DC) and the Imum Coeli (IC). Jupiter, Saturn and the slow planets are not examined. AstralPro tightened these orbs after noticing that wider values led to conjunctions being announced at 3° apart: beyond 2°, a star shares a sector of the sky, it no longer touches the point.
A detected star is woven into chapter I, in the text devoted to the planet or angle it touches, in two or three sentences. There is never a dedicated section or a list. A royal star receives emphatic treatment: its promise and its warning are stated together. Stars have no line in the positions table or in the aspect grid: they exist in your report only through the text of the point they touch.
If no star forms a conjunction within these orbs, the report names no star, does not write that there are none and does not comment on their absence. This is an AstralPro choice: a chart without a star conjunction is a complete chart, and it is better to say nothing than to assert a contact that is too wide.
In the chart of Camille Morel, AstralPro's sample chart (fictional data), the engine detects a single conjunction: Regulus, royal star, conjunct the MC at 0°30'. Regulus was at 29°45' Leo at her birth in 1993, and her Midheaven is at 0°15' Virgo: the star and the angle are in two different signs, but half a degree from each other. For a royal star on an angle, the allowed orb is 2°: the conjunction is well within the rule.
The Midheaven speaks of vocation and public standing. In Camille's report, Regulus therefore brings to chapter I an emphatic reading of her visible trajectory: an ability to hold a recognized place, with the condition attached to this star, keeping the humility that allows her to retain it. No other star is mentioned, because no other touches her nine tested points within the orbs.
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