On 23 September 2029 the north node moves into Sagittarius. The two standard ways of tracking it agree on that date to within a single day. That almost never happens, and it is the exception that shows you the rule.
For the four passes before it, the two methods were up to twenty-eight days apart. That gap is why your birth chart app and your friend’s give you different signs.
This page hands you the dates, explains the gap, and then reports one measured number that refused to behave the way the others did.
Your dates, before anything else
Find your birth date in the first two columns. If it sits inside a window, your north node is in Sagittarius. All times are UTC.
| Date the true node entered Sagittarius | Date the true node left Sagittarius for Scorpio | Length of the stay in days | Date the mean node entered, for comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 April 1955, 21:32 | 4 October 1956, 08:33 | 550 | 13 April 1955 |
| 27 October 1973, 00:57 | 10 July 1975, 00:17 | 621 | 22 November 1973 |
| 1 August 1992, 20:33 | 1 February 1994, 07:04 | 548 | 4 July 1992 |
| 3 March 2011, 11:54 | 30 August 2012, 02:55 | 546 | 13 February 2011 |
| 23 September 2029, 11:36 | 20 March 2031, 23:01 | 543 | 24 September 2029 |
Read down the last two columns and the pattern jumps out. In 1955 the two entries were eleven days apart. In 1973 it was twenty-six days. In 1992, twenty-eight. In 2011, eighteen. Then in 2029, one.
The stays are not equal either. They run from 543 days to 621 days. One promised number, five different answers.
We also scanned this whole stretch at fifteen-minute steps, looking for a border crossed twice. The node sometimes wobbles over a line, slips back, and crosses again days later, which throws every online calculator into disagreement. Sagittarius has ten crossings between 1940 and 2045, five in and five out, and not one of them repeats. Clean every time. The one exception we found in a neighbouring sign is dated to the minute in our north node in Aquarius guide.
Why the two columns disagree at all
There are two accepted ways to place a lunar node. Both are correct. They answer different questions.
The mean node is a smoothed average. It strips out the Moon’s short wobbles. Its speed is fixed at 0.052954 degrees per day, always backward, with no pause. A full lap of the twelve signs takes 18.613 years. One sign takes 566.5 days, every time, without exception.
The true node is the real crossing point, wobbles kept in. We sampled it every six hours from 1900 to 2100. It moves forward 25.9 per cent of the time. You will read that the lunar nodes are always retrograde. That is a fact about the mean node, and it is wrong about the true node one sample in four.
We measured how far the two drift apart. Sampled daily across those two centuries, the average gap is 0.96 degrees and the widest is 1.98 degrees. Under two degrees, always. Two degrees of sky is about two days of travel, which is why the entry dates differ by weeks rather than months, and why the sign only flips for people born very close to a border.
Every date in the table above uses the true node, worked out from the plane of the Moon’s orbit. The mean node column is there so you can see the disagreement instead of being surprised by it. Our guide to the lunar nodes covers the cycle behind both.
What a node is, since it is not a body
The north node is not a body at all. It is the point where the Moon’s path crosses the Sun’s path.
The Moon circles the Earth on a tilted track. The Sun draws its own yearly line across our sky, and readers of charts call that line the ecliptic. Two tilted circles meet at two places. The north node is one. The south node is the other, directly opposite across the wheel.
So no rock and no planet sits there. It is a crossroads, and nothing is built on the corner. The reason anyone tracked these points in the first place is physical: an eclipse happens when a New Moon or a Full Moon lands near a node. That is the whole rule.
Keep the standard picture in mind for the count further down. A birth chart is a house with twelve rooms. Each room stands for one part of life. The planets are the furniture. The nodes are a line ruled through two facing rooms.
The other end of the line is always Gemini
The two nodes face each other across the wheel, with no exception. A north node in Sagittarius means a south node in Gemini, at the same degree.
So a reading of this placement is a reading of one axis, seen from the Sagittarius end. Sagittarius is the sign of the long view: travel, belief, the question behind the question. Our guide to the Sagittarius sign covers that ground in full. Gemini is the sign of the quick exchange: the fact, the errand, the clever answer given fast.
Modern readers draw one line from that pair. The worn groove is collecting information. The growth edge is deciding what it is for.
The number that did not behave
We ran a count on 400,000 charts for this sign, and one result came out unlike anything the neighbouring guides produced.
The question was simple. How close does a Sagittarius north node sit to the Sun, the Moon, or the rising degree? We used a single eight degree orb and counted each contact once per chart, so nothing gets double counted.
Pure chance gives 4.44 per cent for any of these. Sixteen degrees out of three hundred and sixty is 4.44 per cent.
| Point the Sagittarius north node sits close to | Share on the 1950 to 2010 window | Share on the wider 1900 to 2100 window |
|---|---|---|
| The Sun, within eight degrees | 4.63 % | 4.66 % |
| The Moon, within eight degrees | 4.64 % | 4.48 % |
| The rising degree, within eight degrees | 5.04 % | 5.10 % |
Start with the row that says nothing. The Moon figure looked like an excess at 4.64 per cent on the narrow window. We reran it on 1900 to 2100 and it dropped to 4.48 per cent, which is chance. So that one was an artefact of the years we picked, and we drop the claim.
The rising row is the one that held. It sits at 5.04 per cent on the narrow window and 5.10 per cent on the wide one. It went up slightly when we stretched the sample, which is the opposite of what an artefact does.
The reason is plain once you see it. Signs do not climb over the eastern horizon at the same speed. At the latitudes where most people are born, Sagittarius is one of the slower risers, so a larger share of people have a Sagittarius rising sign. The node is pinned to Sagittarius here, so more of these charts have the node near the rising degree. It is geometry and population, not fate.
The Sun row sits a little above chance on both windows. The excess is small and we are not building anything on it.
And the room it lands in: 400,000 charts counted
The sign is shared by everyone born in the windows above. Millions of people. The room is not. That needs your birth time and your birth place.
The method, step by step. We drew 400,000 random birth moments from inside the Sagittarius windows between 1950 and 2010. Each draw got a random clock time and a random spot on Earth. Latitudes were weighted by where people actually live, which puts most draws north of the equator. For each chart we worked out the true node, then the rising sign from local star time and latitude, then read off the whole sign house. Each chart was counted once, in a single room.
All 400,000 draws held a node inside Sagittarius and all were kept. The twelve counts add up to 400,000, and the shares add to 100.00.
| House holding the Sagittarius north node | Number of charts out of 400,000 | Share of all Sagittarius node charts |
|---|---|---|
| 2nd house | 39,276 | 9.82 % |
| 5th house | 39,069 | 9.77 % |
| 6th house | 38,341 | 9.59 % |
| 1st house | 38,297 | 9.57 % |
| 4th house | 38,250 | 9.56 % |
| 3rd house | 38,241 | 9.56 % |
| 7th house | 33,424 | 8.36 % |
| 12th house | 33,118 | 8.28 % |
| 8th house | 27,204 | 6.80 % |
| 11th house | 27,146 | 6.79 % |
| 10th house | 23,872 | 5.97 % |
| 9th house | 23,762 | 5.94 % |
The rooms are not filled evenly. The top sits near 9.8 per cent and the floor near 5.9 per cent, a spread of about 1.65 to 1.
Same cause as the rising result above. Leo and Scorpio are the slowest signs to rise at the latitudes where most people are born, so more people have one of those two rising. A Scorpio rising sign puts a Sagittarius node in the 2nd house. A Leo rising sign puts it in the 5th. Those are the two at the top of the list, and that is the whole reason.
Now the caution. We reran the count on the wider 1900 to 2100 window. There the 2nd came out at 9.88 per cent and the 5th at 9.81 per cent. The order held, but the gap is a few hundredths of a point, which is inside the noise of a sample this size. So treat the 2nd and the 5th as tied at the top rather than ranked.
The same goes for the floor. On the narrow window the 10th sits at 5.97 and the 9th at 5.94. On the wide window they swap places. Tied as well.
What does hold on both windows is the shape of the list: six rooms near 9.6 per cent, two near 8.3, two near 6.8, and two near 5.9. Those steps are far too large to be noise, and they are the part worth keeping.
Three traditions, and they disagree
Here is where most pages go quiet. There is no single view of the lunar nodes. There are three, written centuries apart, answering different questions.
The Hellenistic reading: a gauge of strength
Vettius Valens, writing in Greek in the second century, knew the nodes well. In his work and across the wider Greek tradition, the north node adds and the south node takes away. A planet close to the ascending point gains force. A planet close to the descending point loses it.
That is a rule about the strength of planets, and nothing else. Valens wrote no word about life purpose and no word about past lives. The Greek names describe a direction of travel, not a destiny.
The modern karmic reading: a soul with an assignment
The version you meet on social media is younger than most people assume. It grew out of a meeting between Western charts and Indian ideas in the late nineteenth century.
Martin Schulman set it down in English with Karmic Astrology in 1975. Jan Spiller carried it much further with Astrology for the Soul in 1997. In that reading the south node holds what a soul already carries, and the north node marks the direction it should now travel.
Applied to this axis, the story runs like this. The Gemini south node is a long habit of gathering facts, staying light, and moving on before the point lands. The Sagittarius north node asks for one position held in public and defended. That is a school of thought with a founding date and a paper trail. It is not a tested claim, and charts are not science.
The Vedic reading: two shadow planets with full rank
Indian charts give the nodes a standing the West never gave them. There they are Rahu, the north node, and Ketu, the south node. They count among the nine grahas, alongside the Sun and the Moon. They rule signs, they run long periods, and whole charts are read around them.
One more difference matters for you. Indian charts use the sidereal zodiac, measured against the fixed stars. Western charts use the tropical zodiac, measured from the spring equinox. The two have drifted apart by about twenty-four degrees.
Take twenty-four degrees off a tropical Sagittarius node and you land in Scorpio most of the time. So a person with a tropical north node in Sagittarius has, in an Indian chart, Rahu in Scorpio and Ketu in Taurus. Same sky, different measuring stick, different sign. If a Western reading and an Indian reading of your nodes disagree, this is the usual reason.
A plain reading, with the drama removed
The old groove is Gemini: the fast answer, the second tab, the conversation that never quite lands. The growth edge is Sagittarius: the long view, the position you hold in public, the journey you take because it means something.
Both readings, the ancient one and the modern one, arrive at the same practical note. More information alone will not settle this chart.
What the placement does not do is name a job, a character or an outcome. No chart does. A reader who tells you a Sagittarius node means you must travel the world, teach, or leave your hometown is selling a story.
The next pass: September 2029 to March 2031
There is a second version of this question. Not the node you were born with, but the node moving through Sagittarius for everybody at once.
The last pass ran from 3 March 2011 to 30 August 2012. The next one starts at 11:36 UTC on 23 September 2029 and ends at 23:01 UTC on 20 March 2031.
During those eighteen months the eclipses fall along the Sagittarius and Gemini line. A partial solar eclipse lands in Sagittarius on 5 December 2029. A total lunar eclipse lands in Gemini on 20 December 2029. A partial lunar eclipse lands in Sagittarius on 15 June 2030, and a total solar eclipse lands in Sagittarius on 25 November 2030. That run of dates is why the period will be written about.
Your own node returns to its birth sign every 18.613 years. The return years land near ages 18 or 19, then 37, then 56, then 74. Readers of charts treat those as turning points. The number holds no mystery: it is how fast the Moon’s tilted path swings around.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my north node is in Sagittarius?
Check your birth date against the table on this page. If it falls inside one of the five windows, your north node is in Sagittarius. You do not need a birth time for the sign. You need one for the room.
Where is my south node if my north node is in Sagittarius?
In Gemini, at the same degree. The two nodes always face each other across the chart, six signs apart.
Why does one app say Sagittarius and another says Scorpio?
One is using the true node and the other the mean node. We measured the gap between them at 0.96 degrees on average and 1.98 degrees at most. In 1992 that gap put the two entry dates twenty-eight days apart.
How long does the north node stay in Sagittarius?
Between 543 and 621 days across the five passes listed above. The mean node gives a flat 566.5 days every time.
Are the lunar nodes always retrograde?
The mean node is. The true node is not. Sampled every six hours from 1900 to 2100, the true node moves forward 25.9 per cent of the time.
When is the north node in Sagittarius next?
From 23 September 2029 to 20 March 2031. Before that it was in Sagittarius from 3 March 2011 to 30 August 2012.
Does a Sagittarius north node sit near the rising sign more than other signs do?
Yes, by a small margin. We measured 5.04 per cent on charts from 1950 to 2010 and 5.10 per cent on charts from 1900 to 2100, against a chance level of 4.44 per cent. Sagittarius is a slow riser at northern latitudes, which is the whole cause.
Where to go next
Three pages fill in what this one skipped. The north node meaning guide covers the point across all twelve signs. The north node in Capricorn guide picks up on the exact day this one begins, and the north node in Libra guide runs the same measurements on a different axis.
Astrovision builds a full natal chart from your date, your exact time and your birth place, then delivers it as a written guide and a personal podcast. That is the only way to know which of the twelve rooms your Sagittarius node actually sits in.