Neptune
The modern co-ruler of Pisces, around fourteen years in each sign. Astrology reads it as imagination, longing and the blurring of boundaries, mostly through the house it falls in.
Where Neptune is now
What Neptune stands for
Neptune stands for what a person longs for and cannot quite name: ideals, imagination, boundaries dissolving, and the fog that comes with all three.
Neptune takes its name from the Roman god of the sea, and astrology has kept the sea in its reading: what has no edges, what cannot be held, what dissolves and what seeps in. It is read as imagination, compassion, music, faith and escape, and equally as confusion, illusion and the wish not to see clearly. Which side a reading stresses depends on the rest of the chart.
As with Uranus, astrologers looked to the years of its discovery for what it might mean. The 1840s brought the first public operation under ether, a few weeks after the planet was found, along with the spread of photography, the table-rapping séances that began spiritualism, and the mass political hopes of 1848. Out of those came the meanings still in use: the dulling of pain, the image that stands in for the thing, the unseen, and ideals shared by a crowd.
How Neptune moves
It goes round the zodiac in about a hundred and sixty-five years, roughly fourteen in each sign, and backwards for about five months of every year.
It was found in 1846 by calculation before anybody saw it, from the pull it was having on Uranus.
Urbain Le Verrier worked out where the unseen planet ought to be, and Johann Galle found it at the Berlin Observatory on 23 September 1846, within about a degree of the predicted place; John Couch Adams in England had made a similar calculation. Neptune is too faint ever to be seen with the naked eye, and in 2011 it completed its first orbit since it was found.
It was in Pisces from 2011 to January 2026 and is now in Aries until 2038 and 2039. It spends so much of each year retrograde that more than four charts in ten have it that way, so being born with Neptune retrograde is ordinary.
Galileo drew Neptune twice in his notebooks, in December 1612 and January 1613, when it happened to stand near Jupiter, and took it for a star. Seventeen days after the discovery William Lassell found its largest moon, Triton, which circles the planet backwards. Voyager 2 flew past in August 1989 and is still the only spacecraft to have been there. The element neptunium, first made in 1940, was named for it as the one that follows uranium.
Neptune gains only about two degrees a year once its retrograde of nearly three degrees is taken off, so it can hover near a single degree of a chart for the better part of two years. Its recent signs were Capricorn from 1984 to 1998 and Aquarius from 1998 to 2011 and 2012.
Rulership, dignity and sect
Neptune has no sign of its own in the traditional scheme, which was settled long before it was found. Modern astrology makes it co-ruler of Pisces with Jupiter.
The Pisces page reads the sign with both of its rulers. Neptune has no traditional exaltation, fall or sect, and the exaltations modern writers have proposed for it disagree with one another, so none is given here.
In practice Neptune is read most strongly where it touches something personal: a conjunction with the Sun or the Moon, a square to Venus, or a place close to the rising degree. The aspects page describes those angles; a Neptune with no close contacts is read more quietly.
Reading Neptune by sign and by house
By house, Neptune is read as where a person idealises, gives without counting and finds it hard to see things plainly: in the second, a vague or generous attitude to possessions; in the seventh, partners seen through a haze of hope; in the twelfth, its natural house by modern reckoning, a rich inner life and a need for solitude. The houses describe each of those areas in full.
A worked example: Neptune in the fifth house is read as creativity that draws on fantasy and romance that begins as an ideal. With Neptune in Pisces there, as for people born between 2012 and 2025, the reading leans further towards music, art and the imagined over the planned.
No one has a Neptune return; a full round is longer than any life. The points astrologers read are the square to its birth position, at about forty-one, and the opposition, at about eighty-two. The square falls in the same years as the Uranus opposition, and the two are often read together as the midlife stretch, when early ideals are measured against what has come of them.
What gets confused about Neptune
Neptune is sometimes treated as the planet of deception and nothing else, but astrology reads the same placement as sensitivity as readily as confusion. And because a whole generation shares its sign, what is written about Neptune in a sign describes the mood of an era more than a single person.
Questions people ask
What does Neptune represent in a birth chart?
Neptune is read as imagination, idealism and the longing for something beyond ordinary life, together with the confusion and escapism that can come with them. It is the modern co-ruler of Pisces. Because it spends about fourteen years in a sign, astrologers read it mainly through its house, where a person is thought to idealise or blur things, and through its aspects to the personal planets.
How was Neptune discovered?
By calculation. Uranus was not following its predicted path, and Urbain Le Verrier worked out that an unseen planet beyond it could explain the difference. Johann Galle looked where Le Verrier pointed and found Neptune on 23 September 1846, close to the predicted spot. John Couch Adams had reached a similar result in England. It was the first planet found by mathematics before it was seen.
How many years is Neptune in each sign?
About fourteen, and each change of sign takes a year or so of crossing, backing out and crossing again. Neptune was in Pisces from 2011 to January 2026 and is in Aries until 2038 and 2039. Everyone born within a stretch of about fourteen years shares a Neptune sign, which is why astrologers put more weight on its house.
Can you see Neptune without a telescope?
No. Neptune shines at about magnitude eight, too faint for the naked eye even under a dark sky, though binoculars can show it as a faint point to somebody who knows exactly where to look. That is part of why it was found only in 1846, and why its astrological meaning was added in the modern era rather than inherited from the ancient tradition.
What does Neptune retrograde mean?
Neptune appears to go backwards for a little over five months of every year, when the Earth overtakes it on the inside track. Astrology reads the stretch as a time when illusions are easier to see for what they are. In a birth chart it is too common to single anyone out, since more than four charts in ten have it, and it is read only as an imagination that works inwardly.