How to Find Your Chart Shape and Hemisphere Emphasis (Step by Step)

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This page is the working method. It turns the planet table of your chart into a set of gaps, runs the shape guidelines in a fixed order, and then tallies the planets by house half and quadrant. What each result may mean is covered elsewhere: chart shapes for the seven Jones patterns, and hemisphere emphasis for the halves, quadrants and their cautions.

This is a working identification method for doing it yourself. The free chart gives you the positions and houses, but it does not classify chart shapes, count hemispheres or name a handle or leading planet, so every step below is done by hand.

You need a pencil, a calculator and about fifteen minutes. The shape part needs only planet positions. The hemisphere part also needs a reliable birth time.

Step 1: copy the ten planets

Generate your free birth chart and copy the ten planets from the Sun to Pluto from the planet table under the wheel. Each one appears as degree, minute and sign glyph, for example 15°10' ♑. Leave out the Lunar Nodes, Chiron, Lilith and the angles; they do not count toward a shape or a hemisphere.

Work from the table, not the wheel. The wheel spreads glyphs apart so they stay readable, so a glyph can be drawn well away from its true position. The small tick mark on the inner ring shows where the planet really is.

Step 2: convert each position to a longitude

Add the start of the sign to the degree, and divide the minutes by 60:

So 15°10' Capricorn becomes 270 + 15 + 10/60 = 285.17°. The table cuts off the seconds rather than rounding, so your figures can differ from the calculation by a few hundredths of a degree. That never matters unless a gap is right on a guideline.

Step 3: sort and measure the gaps

Sort the ten longitudes from smallest to largest. Subtract each one from the next to get nine gaps, then work out the tenth gap, which wraps past 0° Aries: 360 minus the largest longitude, plus the smallest. The ten gaps always add up to 360°.

Mark the largest gap. The occupied span, the part of the wheel the planets cover, is 360° minus that largest gap.

Step 4: test the shapes in order

Go down this list and stop at the first test the chart passes clearly. One-line reminders only; the shapes reference has the detail.

1. Bundle: occupied span about 120° or less.
2. Bowl: occupied span about 180° or less.
3. Bucket: take away one planet at the edge of the group; if the other nine fit within about 180° and that single planet sits across the empty side, it is the handle. A pair on the open side is not a handle here.
4. Locomotive: occupied span about 240°, with one empty sector of about 120°.
5. Seesaw: two gaps of roughly 60° or more, splitting the planets into two groups of at least two each.
6. Splash: no gap dominates and the planets are spread round the whole wheel.
7. Splay: three or more clearly separated clusters of uneven size.

If the chart only nearly passes a test, or passes one test in a lopsided way, record that: "borderline Bowl", "mixed", or "no clean Jones type" are valid results. Do not move the numbers to make a chart fit, and do not use Splay for whatever is left over.

Step 5: name the handle or leading planet, if any

For a Bucket, the handle is the single planet on the open side. For a Locomotive, the leading planet is the one immediately following the large empty sector in the clockwise direction used in the Jones tradition: in zodiac order, the first planet after the empty sector ends. Both are reading devices, not a ranking of strength. Other shapes have neither.

Step 6: check the shape against birth time

Planets move during the day, the Moon fastest. If your birth time is known, the shape uses the positions for that time and you are done.

If the time is unknown, generate the chart for 00:00 and for 23:59 on the birth date and repeat Step 3 for both. If the same shape comes out both times and no gap is close to a guideline, the result is reasonably safe. That comparison is a sensitivity check, not proof that the shape held at every minute in between. If the result changes, or any gap sits close to a guideline at either end, call the shape uncertain. Moon sign without a birth time uses the same two-chart check for the Moon's sign, and how to read a chart without a birth time covers what else stays usable.

Step 7: tally the houses (exact birth time only)

Without a reliable birth time, skip this step; hemispheres and quadrants cannot be counted.

1. For each of the ten planets, note the house it sits in. On the wheel, see which numbered house sector each tick mark falls in. If a planet is close to a house line, settle it with the cusp degrees, as shown in how to find your house cusps.
2. Count above (houses 7 to 12) and below (houses 1 to 6).
3. Count eastern (houses 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3) and western (houses 4 to 9).
4. Count the four quadrants: houses 1 to 3, 4 to 6, 7 to 9 and 10 to 12.
5. Write the raw counts first, for example 7/3. Then, as a labelled reading convention: 7 or more of 10 is a clear emphasis, 6/4 a mild lean, 5/5 balanced.
6. If the time is uncertain, rerun the chart at the earliest and latest plausible times. If any count changes, the emphasis is time-sensitive and should be reported that way.

High latitudes. If the chart notes Equal houses from the Ascendant (births above 66° north or south), the 1 to 6 versus 7 to 12 count is the displayed lower and upper house half, subject to the polar Ascendant caution. The 10 to 3 versus 4 to 9 count and the four quadrants are Equal-house sectors, not a true east/west or true-angle split. Read chart angles at high latitudes before drawing any conclusion from them.

Worked example: Ruben

Ruben is the fictional example used in several Astrologist.com guides: London, 5 January 1993, 12:00. His chart was recalculated with the same routines that draw the free chart. Placidus houses; Ascendant 3°46' Taurus, Midheaven 13°46' Capricorn.

Positions, sorted, with gaps

The longitudes are the calculation's values to 0.01°. The largest gap is 94.08°, from Venus to the Moon, so the occupied span is 265.92°.

Running the tests

• Bundle, Bowl: no. A span of about 266° is far wider than 120° or 180°.
• Bucket: no. Leaving out the Moon still leaves nine planets over about 223°; leaving out any other single planet leaves a wider span. No nine fit in a half.
• Locomotive: no, by this guideline. The span is near 240° but the largest empty sector is 94°, well short of about 120°.
• Seesaw: the guideline is met. Two empty arcs of 94.08° and 85.20° split the planets into a Moon and Mars group and an eight-planet group from Jupiter to Venus.

Result: Seesaw, borderline. The numbers fit, but the split is lopsided: one side holds only two planets. Some readers would hesitate to call that a full Seesaw, so the honest label is a borderline Seesaw rather than a clean one. Ruben has no handle or leading planet, since those belong to the Bucket and Locomotive.

Two side checks show why the method is fixed in advance. If Chiron (22°48' Leo, 142.80°) were counted, it would fall inside the 85° arc and split it into about 34° and 51°, and the Seesaw reading would disappear. That is why the site counts ten planets only. And if Ruben's birth time were unknown, the 00:00 and 23:59 charts put the Moon at 29°03' Taurus and 12°29' Gemini; the two empty arcs measure about 88° and 85° at 00:00 and about 100° and 85° at 23:59, so the result would be the same at both ends of the day.

Hemisphere tally

• Above / below: 7/3. A clear upper-hemisphere emphasis by the 7-of-10 convention.
• East / west: 6/4. A mild eastern lean.
• Quadrants: 1 / 2 / 2 / 5 (first to fourth), with half the planets in houses 10 to 12.

Now the time check. The Sun is only about 1.4° past the Midheaven, with Uranus and Neptune about 4° to 5° past it. Rerunning the chart minute by minute shows the 7/3 above/below count holds from 11:24 to 12:47. The east/west count does not hold as well: it is 6/4 from 11:20 to 12:06, becomes 5/5 at 12:07 when the Midheaven passes the Sun, and 4/6 from 12:18. With the time taken as exactly 12:00 the counts above stand; if that time were only good to the nearest quarter of an hour, the upper emphasis would be safe but the eastern lean would have to be called time-sensitive.

Next steps

Read what your result may mean on the chart shapes and hemisphere emphasis pages, then fit it into the whole chart with how to read a birth chart and planets meaning. If you enjoy this kind of check, how to find aspect patterns applies the same measure-everything approach to T-squares and grand trines. The methodology page lists the site's calculation choices, and you can ask the Astrologist about your result; it can talk through the ideas but does not classify your chart automatically.

Related articles

• Birth Chart Shapes
• Hemisphere Emphasis in a Birth Chart
• How to Find Your House Cusps
• How to Find Aspect Patterns
• Can You Know Your Moon Sign Without a Birth Time?
• How to Read a Birth Chart