Pluto Transits to Natal Chiron: Which Contacts Fit, How Firm the Count Is

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A Pluto transit to natal Chiron is a date on which Pluto, moving through today's sky, reaches one of eight fixed points measured from your birth Chiron: the same degree, or 60°, 90°, 120° or 180° away on either side. In the period studied on this page, from a 1994 birth to the start of 2061, Pluto met only three of those eight points, and it crossed each of those three more than once, because it backs up for several months every year.

So the useful first question is not "when is my Pluto-Chiron transit?" but "which of the eight can happen at all between my birth and the date I care about, which lie outside that stretch, and how firm is the answer if my natal Chiron is not known exactly?" This page works through that question for one invented birth.

Chiron is a small body, classed as a centaur, not a planet. In common astrological usage natal Chiron is read as a sensitive area of the chart and Pluto as depth and intensity. Any contact between them is one optional lens for reflection; it causes nothing and tells you nothing certain about a life.

Educational guide only. Astrologist.com has no transit tool: no transit calendar, return chart or timing report. The free birth chart shows natal positions only, and every date below was computed offline for a fictional person. Chiron limit: the chart includes natal Chiron only for birth dates from 1 January 1920 to 31 December 2060. For any other birth date it leaves Chiron out, and this page does not apply.

The stretch of sky Pluto can cover

Write natal Chiron as a single longitude C, counted from 0° Aries. The eight targets are C plus 0°, 60°, 90°, 120°, 180°, 240°, 270° and 300°: conjunction, waxing sextile, square and trine, opposition, then waning trine, square and sextile. Each target is a separate point.

At the birth, moving Pluto sits exactly on natal Pluto. The angle from natal Chiron forward to natal Pluto, taken round 360°, is therefore where Pluto starts. From it you get the forward advance for each target: the offset minus that starting angle, taken round 360°. That is angular geometry only: how far ahead of the starting place the target sits if you count forward round the zodiac. It does not give the order in which targets come up, and it does not say whether Pluto gets there. If Pluto first moves backward, a target just behind its starting place can be crossed before any target ahead of it, even though its forward advance is close to 360°.

Order and reach both come from the path itself. Follow Pluto from the birth to the end of the period you choose, through every backward loop and past 0° Aries without resetting, and note the lowest and highest points it reaches on that running scale. Each target then stands at several levels, C plus its offset plus any whole number of 360° turns, including levels below the starting place. A target is crossed in the period only if one of its levels lies within that measured stretch, and crossings come in the order the path reaches those levels. Pluto's average pace or orbital period cannot settle that for you, because the stretch also depends on the birth date, where Pluto is in its yearly loops at the start, and where the period ends.

Worked example: London, 21 October 1994, 14:40

The person is invented; every position comes from the chart's own code, run offline. The birth date was picked on purpose: a search of birth dates was run for one where two of Pluto's turning points in the period fall inside the small range natal Chiron covers over the birth day, so that the count questions below have something to show. The page makes no claim about how often charts behave like this.

• Birth: 14:40 on 21 October 1994 in London. Britain was still on summer time (UT+1) until 23 October that year, so this is 13:40 UT, and the London calendar date runs from 23:00 UT on 20 October up to, but not including, 23:00 UT on 21 October. The trial times further down are whole minutes, so the last one sampled is 23:59 local time (22:59 UT).
• Natal Chiron: unrounded 170.705514° (20°42'19.8" Virgo), moving forward at 0.125° a day. The chart rounds to 0.01° first (170.71°) and then cuts off part-minutes, so it displays 20°42' Virgo.
• Natal Pluto: 236.813207° (26°48'47.5" Scorpio), moving forward. Starting angle: natal Pluto minus natal Chiron = 66.11°. That is 6.11° wider than an exact sextile, and this chart's aspect list shows no Pluto-Chiron aspect; the natal aspect is a separate topic, covered in Pluto sextile Chiron (natal aspect).
• Period studied: from the birth instant up to, but not including, 00:00 UT on 1 January 2061 (ages 0 to 66.20). It stays inside the 1920 to 2060 Chiron range and inside the span over which the repository checks Pluto day by day. The end date is a choice for this example only.
• Method: Pluto every six hours, each crossing pinned down to under thirty seconds and each station to about a minute. These are calculation tolerances, not accuracy claims. Like the chart, the calculation works on an internal time scale about a minute ahead of UT in 1994 and reads the Chiron table there. Dates are UT, and dates after October 2026 are projections.

In this period Pluto's lowest point was its starting place, 26°48' Scorpio: it was moving forward at the birth and never came back below it. Its highest point was a retrograde station on 22 June 2060 at 23°03' Pisces (353.06°). That is 116.25° of zodiac, with 132 stations along the way.

Sorting the eight contacts

D = Pluto moving forward, R = moving backward. Eleven crossings fall in the period, in three groups. In this example the forward sorting also matches the order of reach, but only because Pluto's lowest point in the period was its starting place. Since it never went back below the start, each target has just one level to check, the one ahead of the start, and a target is reached exactly when its forward advance is less than the 116.25° Pluto covered; all three that qualify were. The waxing sextile is the near miss in the other direction: its target sits 6.11° behind natal Pluto, and since Pluto never went back below its starting place, the sextile could not come up again. That shortcut belongs to this example. On a path that dips below its starting place before rising, targets behind the start must be checked at their lower levels too, and the less-than-the-stretch test does not apply.

How the groups were formed. The rule was fixed before any dates were read: successive crossings of one target belong to one group while Pluto stays within 30° of it in between. In this period Pluto never moved more than 2.45° from a target between crossings of the same group. A group counts as complete when, after its last crossing, Pluto moved more than 30° from the target; by the same rule any later crossing would start a new group. For this test only, the calculation was carried a week past the period, to 00:00 UT on 8 January 2061, as a supplementary closure check; that week is not part of the period studied and adds no crossings to the counts. The square group passed the test on 4 March 2018 and the trine group on 28 March 2036, and neither target was crossed again up to the end of the supplementary check. A group that does not pass it is open at the end.

Spans are not durations. The trine group runs from 4 March 2018 to 20 October 2019, 594.7 days first to last. That says when the first and last crossings came, not how long anyone was "under" the contact, and it is not a natal orb carried over to transits.

Out of reach in this period is not "never"

Two kinds of "none" sit in that table, and they mean different things.

• Before the birth. The waning sextile, conjunction and waxing sextile targets were all crossed between 1920 and 1994. They exist on Pluto's path; this person simply arrived after them. A period that started earlier would contain them.
• Not reached anywhere from 1920 to 2061. In that span Pluto never went below 5°40' Cancer (a station on 20 March 1920) or above that 23°03' Pisces station in 2060. Everything from 23°03' Pisces round through Aries, Taurus and Gemini to 5°40' Cancer is outside that span, and the waning trine and waning square targets, 20°42' Taurus and 20°42' Gemini, fall in it. That says these contacts do not occur in this period, and that the coverage analysis on this page ran only from 1920 to the start of 2061; the one calculation beyond that, the supplementary closure check to 8 January 2061, was used only to test whether groups had closed. It does not say Pluto can never stand there.

The same chart with a different period would sort differently. Ending the study in 2040 would remove the opposition; starting it in 1920 would add three groups. Results like these always belong to a named period.

The contact at the end of the period

The opposition is the one to read carefully. Its forward advance, 113.89°, is only 2.36° short of everything Pluto covered by 2061. Pluto crossed the target on 1 April 2059, came back on 17 September 2059 and crossed forward again on 14 February 2060. It then turned retrograde 2.36° beyond the target on 22 June 2060, turned forward again on 4 December 2060 at 20°55' Pisces, only 0.21° beyond it, and ended the period 0.37° beyond it, moving forward.

Nothing in the period brings Pluto back across the target after February 2060, so three crossings is the count for this period. The eleven crossings reported here are counted only before 1 January 2061. A supplementary check through 8 January found no further opposition crossing and no 30-degree departure (after the last crossing Pluto was never more than 2.36° from the target), so the group remains open; later returns beyond that supplementary check are unresolved. Any chart with a target between about 19°42' and 23°03' Pisces meets the same edge in a period ending in 2061, because that is where Pluto is looping when the period ends.

When the birth time is not known

Without a birth time, natal Chiron could be wherever it stood during the London calendar date. For each trial time, natal Chiron, natal Pluto, the Moon and everything else come from that same single instant, and the period opens at that instant. Over the day natal Chiron moved forward from 170.629031° at 00:00 local time to 170.753824° at 23:59, the last sampled minute, and reached 170.753911° at the end of the date (24:00): 0.1249°, or 7.49 arc-minutes. The chart takes Chiron from a daily table with straight lines between noon values; the three values around this date (20, 21 and 22 October at 12:00 UT) rise one after another, so over the whole continuous day natal Chiron only increased, with no turning point and no 0/360 wrap. For comparison, the natal Moon moved 11.79° over the same day.

A count can change only when the target passes the level of one of Pluto's stations inside the period, or Pluto's position at the start or end of the period. Because the period opens at the birth, the start is taken at the same trial instant as natal Chiron; over the whole date Pluto's starting place stayed at least 6.07° from every target. Every one of the 281 stations from 1920 to 2061, and the end position, was checked against the full range of each of the eight targets. Three stations fall inside. One, in December 1966 beside the conjunction target, comes before the birth; it can only change how many times Pluto crossed that point before this person was born. The two that matter for the period are:

• Pluto's forward station on 3 October 2019 at 20°38'01" Capricorn (290.6337°) lies inside the trine range. Natal Chiron reaches the matching level at the mathematical boundary (approximately 00:53:52 local time).
• Pluto's retrograde station on 20 June 2058 at 20°39'49" Pisces (350.6637°) lies inside the opposition range. Natal Chiron reaches the matching level at the mathematical boundary (approximately 06:38:49 local time).

Neither end of the period comes close: Pluto at 1 January 2061 is 0.32° beyond the top of the opposition range, and the 4 December 2060 station needs a natal Chiron of 170.915°, beyond anything on this date. So the day splits into three pieces:

The split times are numerical estimates. The stations behind them are solved only to about a minute, so the printed second is not an exactly proven moment; the Swiss shifts further down are a separate question. At each mathematical boundary, Pluto's station would sit on the target itself. That is a touch, not a crossing: Pluto reaches the point, stops and turns back without passing it. At the first boundary that leaves 3 square, 3 trine and 5 opposition crossings plus one trine touch; at the second, 3 square, 5 trine and 3 opposition crossings plus one opposition touch. Just before and just after each one, the count of that contact differs by two. The first and last pieces both total eleven, but not with the same contacts, so a total can hide a real difference.

Times one minute either side of each split, plus a point inside each piece, were run separately and match the table. Then the full search was rerun for 145 trial times (every ten minutes from 00:00 to 23:50, plus 23:59), each opening the period at its own instant. Because totals can match with different contacts, the comparison matched every contact: the 105 trial times from 06:40 to 23:59 have the same 3 square, 5 trine and 3 opposition crossings as 14:40. Across them the square dates moved by 2.6 to 3.4 days, the first three trine dates by 2.7 to 4.4 days and the opposition dates by 3.6 to 4.4 days. The two trine crossings of September and October 2019 moved by about 11 days; they sit closer to the 3 October station the earlier the time, and merge into it at the first split, because Pluto was moving at under 0.01° a day there. These are spreads at the sampled times, not proven limits for every second of the day.

Entered with no birth time, the chart anchors natal Chiron at noon (20°41' Virgo here) and shows no houses. That is a reference point, not an estimate of the birth time.

Rounding, and a second ephemeris

The unrounded value, the chart's 0.01° value and the displayed minute are three separate inputs.

• 0.01° value, 170.71°, is 0.0045° above the unrounded value. No count changed. The fast crossings moved by 3.1 to 5.3 hours and the slow 2019 pair by 12.5 and 12.9 hours; two dates changed (19 June 2004 to 18 June, 16 September 2019 to 15 September).
• Displayed minute, 20°42' Virgo, is 170.70°, 0.0055° below the unrounded value. No count changed. The fast crossings moved by 3.8 to 6.5 hours and the slow pair by 16.0 and 16.4 hours; three dates changed (12 June 2018 to 13 June, 20 October 2019 to 19 October, 1 April 2059 to 31 March).

Because the chart rounds first and truncates second, the true value behind this displayed 20°42' Virgo lies from 170.695° to just under 170.715°, so it can sit above or below the 170.70° you see. The lowest of those values is still 0.031° above the higher split level, so the displayed minute is enough to settle the count here. Nearer a split level, it would not be.

The Swiss Ephemeris, a widely used independent ephemeris, was used only to check these numbers. At this birth it puts natal Chiron 0.24 arc-seconds below the chart's value and natal Pluto 0.15 arc-seconds above it. At all eleven crossings, Swiss Pluto sat within 1.72 arc-seconds of the chart's target. Solving each crossing again with Swiss Pluto against the chart's natal Chiron target moved it by at most 0.56 hours; against a target built from the Swiss natal Chiron, by at most 0.48 hours. The slow 2019 pair moved by only 0.17 and 0.15 hours. The 132 Pluto stations in the period agreed with Swiss within 1.78 arc-seconds and 0.27 hours.

The split times are more sensitive. Swiss puts the 2058 station 1.70 arc-seconds lower, which moves the opposition split from 06:38:49 to 06:33:34 local time; the trine split moves from 00:53:52 to 00:53:08. For a birth at 00:00, one of the times with five opposition crossings, the two 2058 crossings beside that station moved by 2.2 hours under Swiss. A birth logged a few minutes from a split time is therefore not settled by either ephemeris alone.

Possible themes when Pluto contacts Chiron

If you use these at all, weigh them beside natal Chiron's sign, its aspects and, with a dependable birth time, its house. They are questions for reflection, not results:

• Conjunction. Looking honestly at a theme that has long felt sensitive.
• Squares. A wish to go deeper set beside a wish to protect something tender; often read as a prompt to choose your own pace.
• Opposition. Your own way of handling that theme set beside other people's views of it.
• Trines and sextiles. Often seen as quieter times for patient, unhurried attention.

These are interpretive patterns. Nothing here forecasts or explains any event, and none of it says a transit opens or closes a wound, brings trauma, healing, crisis, loss, coercion or illness, or changes anything in work, money or relationships. Chiron's own cycle is covered in Chiron return and why Chiron changes signs unevenly; the same Chiron targets against Uranus and Neptune are in Uranus transits to natal Chiron and Neptune transits to natal Chiron. For Pluto against other natal points, see Pluto transits to natal Saturn and Pluto transits to natal Jupiter.

Checking your own chart

1. Check the birth date is from 1 January 1920 to 31 December 2060; outside it the chart has no Chiron. Read natal Chiron and natal Pluto from the free birth chart (see Chiron in astrology for background) and write each as one longitude from 0° Aries.
2. Work out the starting angle and the forward advance for all eight targets. This is geometry only: it does not tell you the order in which targets come up, or whether they come up at all.
3. Name your period. With a Tropical ephemeris, follow Pluto from its first day to its last, loops included, and find its lowest and highest points on a running scale that does not reset at 0° Aries. Place each target at every level, C plus its offset plus a whole number of 360° turns, that falls in that stretch, including levels below the starting place; crossings come in the order the path reaches those levels. Sort each target into: crossed in the period, crossed before or after it, or not reached in the span your ephemeris covers.
4. List every crossing with its direction. Mark any group whose last crossing comes so close to the end that you cannot tell whether it is finished.
5. If the birth time is uncertain, find the full range natal Chiron can take over the allowed times, not just its two end values: check for a turning point or a 0/360° wrap in between, and with an interpolated table check the values at the table points too. A count can change only where a target's range contains the level of a Pluto station inside your period, or Pluto's position at the period's start or end; stations outside the period cannot change its count. If the start of the period moves with the birth time, compare each target with Pluto at that same trial instant. Treat each such level as a possible split, not a certain one: work out the crossings just before and just after it, see which ones survive, and check whether an endpoint counts as inside the period. A target sitting exactly on a period endpoint and a station that only touches a target are different cases; handle each on its own terms.

About the checks behind these numbers: the chart shows Pluto for birth dates from 1 January 1885 to 31 December 2099, using the series in chapter 37 of Jean Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms reduced to an apparent position seen from the Earth. The repository compares it with Swiss at noon on every day from 25 December 1919 to 8 January 2061, with all 281 stations paired, and runs a wider daily check from 1885 to 2099 without pairing stations; the code's slightly wider internal date guard is not extra coverage. In the run for this batch, the largest daily Pluto difference was 1.78 arc-seconds and the worst station 0.28 hours, against test limits of 0.05° and 0.5 hours. The Chiron table differed from Swiss by at most 0.00066° over the same 51,516 noon values, with all 276 stations within 0.06 hours (limits 0.05° and 0.25 hours). Those checks are made at noon values; they do not prove the accuracy of every in-between instant, and they are not transit-date accuracy figures.

To work transits by hand, see how to read transits without a transit tool, and for the wider picture major transits. Ask the Astrologist can talk through natal Chiron and Pluto, or dates you have found yourself; it does not produce transit dates.

Related articles

• Uranus Transits to Natal Chiron
• Neptune Transits to Natal Chiron
• Chiron Return
• Chiron in Astrology
• Why Chiron Changes Signs Unevenly
• Pluto Transits to Natal Saturn
• Neptune and Pluto Midlife Transits
• Pluto Sextile Chiron (natal)
• Major Transits