Everything listed here is astronomy: retrograde periods, ingresses, equinoxes and solstices, computed rather than estimated and predictable centuries ahead.
This is the one part of the subject with a right answer that does not depend on anybody's interpretation. A planet either did cross into a sign at a given minute or it did not.
What the tradition makes of these events is a separate matter, and this page keeps the two clearly apart.
No planet has ever reversed direction. Retrograde motion is an optical effect produced by two bodies moving at different speeds — the same appearance as a slower car sliding backwards against the landscape as you overtake it.
Mercury does this three or four times a year for about three weeks at a time. Every other planet does it too, and the outer ones spend a substantial portion of each year in apparent retrograde.
The dates are calculable to the minute, which is worth noticing given how much is built on top of them.
Mercury governs communication, travel, contracts and the machinery of information moving between people. Its retrograde period is traditionally read as asking for review rather than initiation — check what you sent, reread before signing.
Note the register: that is a suggestion about attention. It is not a prohibition and it is not a forecast of events.
Popular treatment has inflated it into a three-week embargo on ordinary life. That is not in the tradition, and the arithmetic is worth stating: Mercury is retrograde for roughly a fifth of every year. Treating a fifth of your life as unsuitable for decisions is not caution.
An ingress is simply a planet crossing from one sign into the next. For the Sun these mark the familiar seasonal boundaries; the equinoxes and solstices are the Sun entering Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn.
For slower bodies an ingress is a rarer event. Saturn changes sign every two and a half years, Pluto sometimes not for decades, and the tradition treats those as marking longer shifts of emphasis.
None of it predicts an event. An ingress is a position, and what is read into it is interpretation.
As a reference for what is actually happening in the sky, it is accurate and worth consulting. As a schedule for arranging your life around, it is not what the tradition supports.
Do not time a purchase, a contract, a launch or a medical appointment by a retrograde or an ingress. Nothing on this page constitutes advice on health, money or legal matters.
A recurring prompt to reread things carefully is a reasonable habit. A reason to postpone something that matters is not, and the difference is worth holding on to.
