In 13.8 years

Your Solar Return

The annual renewal of vitality, purpose, and direction.

Exact on August 13, 2040.

At age 104.0.

The cycle it opens will run about 12 months, from August 13, 2040 until the next Solar Return on August 13, 2041.

This August marks a threshold: the Sun returns to its natal seat, and a new twelve-month chapter begins. You are entering a cycle shaped by Capricorn rising, a sober, structural tone. The year asks you to build with intention and move through the world with quiet authority.

The returning Sun lands in your 8th house, the realm of intimacy, inheritance, and transformation. This is where your vital energy concentrates this year. Expect the cycle to pull you toward deeper entanglements, financial, emotional, sexual, or psychological. Shared resources, whether money, vulnerability, or secrets, will be central. You may inherit something (literal or figurative), face a reckoning in a close bond, or undergo a necessary shedding of what no longer belongs to you.

The return Moon settles in Libra in your 10th house, painting the emotional weather as diplomatic but public. You’ll feel pulled to balance competing demands, perhaps between private transformation and professional visibility. Your reputation or standing may shift; what others see of you will matter more than usual, even as inner work deepens.

Here is where the wider sky deepens the picture: transiting Chiron is meeting your natal Moon with surgical precision, asking you to heal an old wound around belonging or nurturance. Simultaneously, Jupiter straddles both your Nodes and supports your Mars, a rare alignment. This is expansion meeting destiny. The universe is asking you to claim something you’ve deferred, to take up more space, to act.

This cycle is not quiet. Meet it by naming what you’ve left unfinished in your closest bonds, and be willing to transform.

About The Solar Return

Your Solar Return marks the moment the transiting Sun returns to its exact natal position, your astrological birthday. Astrologers cast a fresh chart for that moment, relocated to wherever you'll spend the year ahead, to read the themes of the coming twelve months. Each Solar Return chart functions as a year-in-miniature forecast: a new rising sign, new planetary placements, new aspects, different territory than the year before. Once a year, every year.

The Return Chart, At A Glance

This is the chart of the return itself: the whole sky at the moment your Sun came back to the spot it held at birth. It describes the cycle that opens, not you as a person, and the birth chart underneath it does not change. That cycle runs from August 13, 2040 to August 13, 2041, about 12 months.

Cast for the return moment, relocated to El Paso.

Rising: Leo Sets the tone of the whole cycle: how this stretch of time tends to go about things. In any chart, Rising is your outward manner and first impression; the mask and lens through which you meet the world; Leo is confident, generous, creative; the 1st house is self, appearance, first impressions.
The returning Sun: 1st house self, appearance, first impressions The part of life this whole cycle works through, where Sun does its work for the next round. In any chart, Sun is core identity, will, vitality, the drive to express your essence; Leo is confident, generous, creative.
Moon: Libra · 3rd house The emotional weather of the cycle: what it will tend to feel like from the inside. In any chart, Moon is emotional needs, instinctual responses, habits, your feeling of safety; Libra is diplomatic, charming, fair-minded; the 3rd house is communication, learning, siblings.
Midheaven: Taurus What the cycle pushes forward in public: the part other people will see. In any chart, Midheaven is your public reputation, career calling, and the face you show to authority and the world at large; Taurus is reliable, patient, practical; the 10th house is career, reputation, authority.
On the angles: Lilith on the Ascendant The loudest placements in the chart: a body sitting on one of its four corners shapes the cycle more than its position alone would suggest.

How this sits with your own chart. A return chart is laid over a birth chart, never swapped for it. Your Sun is still in Leo, exactly where it was at birth, and that is what makes this a return at all. What is new is the frame around it: cast for this moment, that same Sun falls in the 1st house (self, appearance, first impressions), so that is the part of life this cycle asks about. Everything in your birth chart stays as it is; this chart only says what the cycle ahead does with it.

The Wider Sky Around It

The slow, life-shaping transits active at this return, the backdrop the reading reads against.

transiting Chiron conjunction your natal Moon · 0.4° Chiron presses on the old wound so it can teach, sitting right on top of it, so the effect is direct and hard to miss, landing on your Moon. Moon is emotional needs, instinctual responses, habits, your feeling of safety and sits in your 8th house, Intimacy, Transformation, Shared Resources. Chiron, the one making the contact, is the tender wound that becomes wisdom; where you heal others through your own vulnerability.
transiting Jupiter square your natal North Node · 0.5° Jupiter opens things up and asks for more room, at friction, the kind that forces a change rather than inviting one, landing on your North Node. North Node is your evolutionary pull and the qualities you are stretching toward in this life and sits in your 1st house, Self, Appearance, First Impressions. Jupiter, the one making the contact, is growth, faith, opportunity, the beliefs that broaden your horizons.
transiting Jupiter square your natal South Node · 0.5° Jupiter opens things up and asks for more room, at friction, the kind that forces a change rather than inviting one, landing on your South Node. South Node is your accumulated past patterns and talents that feel easy but can keep you stagnant and sits in your 7th house, Partnerships, Marriage, One-on-One Relationships. Jupiter, the one making the contact, is growth, faith, opportunity, the beliefs that broaden your horizons.
transiting Jupiter sextile your natal Mars · 1.2° Jupiter opens things up and asks for more room, offering an opening, if it gets taken, landing on your Mars. Mars is desire, courage, initiative, how you assert or pursue what you want and sits in your 8th house, Intimacy, Transformation, Shared Resources. Jupiter, the one making the contact, is growth, faith, opportunity, the beliefs that broaden your horizons.