Find your moon sign: get to know your other side

May 11, 6:25 AMAstrology ExaminerMaria Barron

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When we looked at actor Rob Pattinson’s stars, many people became curious about their own moon signs. My new Moon Sign Calculator will tell you your moon sign, which is every bit as important as your sun sign. One way to look at it is that the sun is your masculine side, the moon your feminine side, and everyone has both. 

Often, for artistic people, such as Pattinson, whose work includes the movie New Moon, now in production, as well as the films Twilight, Little Ashes and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the moon is more important in the birth chart than the sun. 

When I only knew my sun sign, Aries, I thought astrological descriptions were ridiculously simplistic. And I was right – because I only knew my sun sign. Some of the Aries description was right on. I do go bounding into situations with unbridled optimism, thinking, “Woohoo, yeah, baby. Let’s do this thing.” Lots of idealistic, active warrior energy. I’ll cop to that. 

But Aries is all about the new, and as much as I do love new experiences, new ideas and everything that’s breaking news and cutting edge, it always scares me if I think that something old and deep and valuable and wise – and lovingly passed to us by those who went before us – might get trampled in the race to newness. In a way, I’m all about roots. The older things are and the farther back I can trace a meaning or a common human experience well-expressed, the more I tend to respect and value it. That’s the contradiction reflected in my Aries sun and Capricorn moon. 

Everyone has a sun sign and a moon sign, a yang and a yin – an ego-face of conscious choice and a subconscious set of truths held to be self-evident. In the western part of the world, people tend to know their sun signs. In the eastern part of the world, people tend to know their moon signs. It’s not quite right to look at the distinction between sun and moon as outer and inner ways of being, because our outermost ways of being are represented by our rising signs. Your rising sign is the sign that was rising over the eastern horizon at the moment of your birth at the place you were born. You engage the least familiar parts of the outer world through qualities of the ascendant, at the most superficial edge of self. 

Sun sign and moon sign are both inner senses of self, our two strongest senses of our real self. The personal planets, which are Mercury, Venus and Mars, reflect specific facets of personality in terms of communications, values and willfulness, but the basis of our central personal duality is in the two central pillars of self, wrapped into one another yin-yang style, sun and moon – in an easy or uneasy balance. 

The moon changes signs every two to three days, so I’ve built an online moon sign calculator to let you convert your time of birth, no matter the time zone, to its universal “star date.” The calculator will tell you the position of the moon at the time you were born. That is your natal moon. You’ll need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser to use the calculator, which I have set up at my personal website, AstrologyExaminer.com. The calculator retains absolutely none of your input, so you have complete privacy in using it. 

The time of your birth is probably on your birth certificate. If you don’t know the time, you still need to set the time zone of your birth so the date will translate properly to universal time. Then you can try looking at the beginning and ending of the day to see if the moon changed signs that day. 

When you’ve learned your moon sign, follow the link from there back to the Moon Sign Interpretations page here at Examiner.com. I’ll be adding information to it throughout the day about the meaning of natal moons in each of the signs of the zodiac. After that, we’ll take a look whether your sun and moon are in harmonious or clashing positions and some typical issues with those and approaches for handling them.