The Live Sky Timeline

This page assumes you're already familiar with the Dashboard's layout and the Natal/Transit tabs — see Reading the Dashboard if you need that first. Everything below applies equally to both tabs unless noted.

What the Timeline actually does

Moving the Timeline doesn't just change a clock readout next to the chart — it re-runs the chart calculation for the new moment and redraws the wheel, the Planetary Positions table and the Aspects list to match. In Bi-wheel mode, only the transit ring moves; the natal wheel underneath stays fixed. The chart's blinking LIVE badge disappears the instant you move off "now," and reappears the instant you return to it — a quick visual check for whether you're looking at the present sky or a scrubbed moment.

Reading the track

The track always shows ten steps either side of wherever you currently are — the tick marks and their numeric labels redraw around a thumb that never itself moves, rather than the thumb sliding along a fixed ruler. The thumb turns gold at the zero position and red anywhere else, so you can tell at a glance whether you're on the live moment without reading the label. That label, at the right end of the Timeline card, reads one of three ways:

• At the zero position: Now · ±0 on the Transit tab, or Birth · ±0 on the Natal tab — see Now vs. Birth below for why they differ.
• Away from zero: the offset and unit, e.g. +3 Days or −2 Weeks.
• If you've pinned a specific moment from the Movements-of-the-Moon window, the exact date and time instead, e.g. Aug 13 · 3:45 PM.

Scrubbing, clicking and stepping

There are three ways to move the Timeline with the mouse:

1. 1

   Click anywhere on the track

   Jumps straight to that position.

2. 2

   Drag the track

   Scrubs continuously as you move the pointer. The chart recalculates live while you drag, and the position snaps to the nearest whole unit the moment you let go.

3. 3

   The ◀ / ▶ buttons

   Step exactly one unit at a time — the same distance as pressing the Left/Right arrow keys.

The Now button (labelled Birth on the Natal tab) resets the offset to zero. On the Transit tab it does one more thing worth knowing: if you'd opened a specific moment from the Movements-of-the-Moon window — say, an eclipse or a sign change — clicking Now also releases that pin and returns fully to the live sky, not just to a zero offset relative to the pinned moment.

Choosing a unit

The unit button on the left of the Timeline's header (default: Day) opens a menu of seven step sizes: Second, Minute, Hour, Day, Week, Month and Year. Switching units always resets the offset back to zero — there's no carry-over between scales, so picking Hour while sitting at Day +3 returns you to now rather than jumping to Hour +72.

1 2

1. 1Unit button — opens this menu; shows the active step size (Day by default).
2. 2Seven step sizes — Second, Minute, Hour, Day, Week, Month, Year. Picking one resets the offset to zero.

Keyboard control

The Left and Right arrow keys always step the Timeline, exactly like the ◀ / ▶ buttons, as long as your focus isn't sitting in a text box, search field or dropdown. For everything else, press T to arm a sticky keyboard mode — a small "T" badge lights up next to the Now button while it's active — and then:

1 2 3

1. 1"T" badge — lit while sticky keyboard mode is armed.
2. 2Red thumb — off the zero position; gold means you're on the live moment.
3. 3Offset label — the current step count and unit.

Now vs. Birth — what the offset is measured from

The Timeline's zero point isn't always "this instant" — it depends on which tab you're on:

• Transit tab — zero is live now (or a pinned Movements-of-the-Moon moment, if you've opened one). The location used is your default transit location.
• Natal tab — zero is the loaded profile's actual birth date and time. So +3 Days on the Natal tab means three days after that person was born, not three days from today — and the location used is the profile's own birth location, not your default transit location.

This is why the Now button relabels itself Birth on the Natal tab — it's a genuine reminder, not just cosmetic. Switching tabs while scrubbed doesn't try to translate the offset between the two timeframes; each tab keeps its own.

How the offset carries into the Expanded Chart View

Clicking Expand on the chart toolbar takes whatever the Timeline is currently showing — including any offset — and opens it in the Expanded Chart View as a fixed snapshot. That view never keeps auto-advancing on its own after you've expanded it; if you want it to track live again, return to the Dashboard, reset the Timeline to Now, and expand again.

The aspect-filter stepper isn't a second timeline

On the Transit tab, a second strip appears under the Timeline that looks almost identical — the same track, thumb and left/right buttons. It's easy to assume it scrubs through time too. It doesn't: it steps through which types of aspect are drawn on the chart, not through dates. Its 14 stops, in order, are:

No Aspects → All Aspects → Major Aspects (the default) → Conjunctions → Trines → Squares → Oppositions → Sextiles → Inconjuncts → Semi-Sextile → Semi-Square → Sesquiquadrate → Quintile → Bi-Quintile.

None of the Timeline's keyboard shortcuts apply to it — use its own left/right buttons or click along its track. Its footer note sums it up: "Some aspects may be hidden from settings."

1 2

1. 1Thumb — steps through 14 aspect-type stops; none of the Timeline's keyboard shortcuts apply here.
2. 2Current mode — e.g. "Conjunctions," with the footer note beneath it.

What's next

The chart toolbar's Bi-wheel button and the different wheel styles it can switch between — Western, North Indian, South Indian, East Indian — get their own dedicated walkthrough next: Wheel, North, South & East Styles →