The Sunward field guide
What is astrocartography?
Astrocartography maps where celestial bodies were rising, setting, or crossing a meridian at your birth moment. The geometry is calculated; the life themes assigned to it are astrological interpretations.
A birth moment, drawn across the world
An astrocartography map starts with a particular moment in time. For each supported celestial body, it marks locations where that body was rising, setting, on the upper meridian, or on the lower meridian. These positions form lines across a world map. Two people born at different moments generally receive different lines, even if they share a Sun sign.
Astrologers associate the bodies and these four positions with themes such as public life, relationships, learning, and belonging. Those associations give people a vocabulary for reflection. They do not establish that moving near a line will cause a particular event or improve a life outcome. Keeping calculation and interpretation separate makes the map easier to use thoughtfully.
The information you need
Use your birth date, recorded local birth time, and birth city. Sunward Atlas uses the selected city to identify a named historical time zone, then converts the local clock time to a single UTC instant. This matters because the same clock reading in different time zones represents different moments.
The basic geocentric map depends on that instant. It does not use your birthplace as a starting point for measuring a journey. Destination coordinates enter later, when the tool measures distances from cities to lines. An uncertain birth time remains uncertain after calculation; more decimal places in an output cannot recover missing information.
A concrete example: a city near Venus DSC
Our synthetic teaching input is 1995-06-15 at 09:30 in Asia/Shanghai, corresponding to 1995-06-15 01:30 UTC. This is an invented input used for a reproducible calculation, not a customer story or a claim about someone's experience. Select Shanghai as the birth city when reproducing it in the calculator.
With the Love & connection theme selected, Los Angeles appears about 77 km from the Venus DSC line. The calculated statement is about geography: the city's coordinate is that far from the modeled setting line. The symbolic reading associates Venus and the setting angle with relationships, aesthetics, and collaboration.
A useful response might be to notice the kinds of shared-interest activities you enjoy in a city. It would be a different, unsupported claim to say that this distance promises a relationship. Housing, work, access, existing connections, and your preferences still determine whether a visit or move makes sense.
What Sunward Atlas currently shows
The calculation engine produces 28 lines for the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn across four angles. The current interface selects 6 of these through its life themes. “All themes” means the union of those selected lines, not every line the engine can calculate.
City suggestions come from a defined set of 371 destinations. Each theme returns the 6 nearest candidates by geometric line distance. This is a starting set for exploration, not an exhaustive search of every settlement or a list of the world's objectively best places to live. A birthplace search and a destination shortlist serve different purposes.
Turn a map into a useful question
Start with one question you already care about: what kind of working routine, social environment, or sense of home are you looking for? Choose the corresponding theme, read a candidate’s line label and distance, then separate what the map calculates from what you hope to explore there.
Write down a small, observable next step, such as finding a local class or comparing living costs. Keep notes about the practical reasons a place appeals to you. That creates a useful record even if your interpretation of the map changes. The next guide walks through the actual controls and the same teaching input.
Sources and calculation notes
Technical references below explain the calculations. Practitioner references, where included, document the interpretations attributed to them in the text. Neither type establishes that a planetary line predicts a life outcome. How we use sources