How to Use astro.com for Astrocartography (and What It Misses)
Three clicks and the whole world lit up in colored lines. That was my first astro.com astrocartography map, in a rented room in Calgary, not long after I landed from Kazakhstan. I stared at it for forty minutes. Then I closed the tab. Not one line meant anything to me yet.
I am Grigor, and I develop and print astrocartography maps now. Fifteen years of chart work sits behind that sentence. The free tool on astro.com is still where I send anyone who has never seen their own lines. This page walks the tool the way I use it. Then the four things the screen will not show you.
Where the astro.com Astrocartography Map Actually Lives
Most people searching for astro.com astrocartography never find it, because the website does not use that word in its navigation. The tool is called AstroClick Travel. Look under Free Horoscopes, then locational astrology. Astrodienst is the Swiss company running astro.com, so astrodienst astrocartography and astro.com astrocartography describe the same map. One company. Still two names people type.
Enter your birth data and create a profile first. Date of birth, clock time, birthplace. The atlas on the website resolves your city and its time zone for you. Round the clock time to the nearest hour and your four angle lines shift by hundreds of miles. That field carries more weight here than in a natal chart reading.
What the Free Map Plots, and What It Skips
So ten bodies get lines on AstroClick Travel. Sun, Moon, the planets, plus the Moon’s Nodes. Each body then draws four lines in a single color. One per angle of your birth chart. Astro.com labels those angles AS, DS, MC and IC.
Click a line and an explanation panel opens. Then click a crossing point for another one. That interactivity is still the best thing about the tool. Where you sit relative to your Venus line, readable in ninety seconds.
AstroClick Local Space, the Tool Nobody Clicks
AstroClick Local Space also sits directly beside Travel in the same menu. Different math though. Rather than planetary lines wrapping the globe, it draws directions outward from one place. I use it for city work. Which street my Venus line runs down. The planet pointing at my kitchen table. Most visitors never click that second tool. For anyone who is not planning to emigrate, it is the more practical of the two.
Free, Subscription, and What Astrodienst Plus Buys
AstroClick Travel costs nothing. So does Local Space. The Extended Chart Selection is also free. Neither the atlas query nor the custom ephemeris generator carries a fee. Astrodienst even publishes a 9000-year ephemeris in PDF format, free.
Money only enters in two places, though. Chart drawings in PDF format, the print-quality ones, run on a subscription. Astrodienst Plus is a low-cost annual subscription that removes ads and stores 2,000 records. Neither purchase adds a single line to your astrocartography map. You are buying output quality and storage. Not more astrology.
The Four Things the astro.com Astrocartography Map Misses
Ten bodies is not a whole chart. Chiron still never appears on the travel map. Neither do the asteroids. The midpoints are missing too, and those bother me most of all. My current home sits between my Sun line and my Jupiter line. That band is a midpoint. No free tool ever drew it for me. So I found it by hand on paper.
Scale is the second limit, though. One world map on one screen. A line that looks like it clips your city can sit a hundred miles east. That is also why people conclude they have no lines near them. So I read at six levels now. Global, then country, then province, then city, then the apartment, then the seat on the plane. Matryoshka dolls. The free map hands you level one and stops there.
Third, the interpretations are written for everybody. Same Venus paragraph for you as for the next visitor. Still, that is no fault of Astrodienst. They built a general reference. Your actual question is the part it cannot know.
Fourth is the object itself. A screenshot lives in your downloads folder for a week. Then you forget the tab existed. What hangs on my wall gets looked at on a Tuesday morning, with a real decision in front of me.
The Years It Took to Read My Own Map
Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. My Moon IC line runs close to that city. At 24 I moved to Calgary, where my Moon MC line runs straight through. The two cities also sit nearly opposite each other on the globe. Twelve hours apart on the clock. Same Moon. Opposite angle, opposite hemisphere. My free chart showed both lines back then and I felt nothing about it.
Ordering a reading from another astrologer was my first real move. I asked my questions. The answers did not satisfy me. So I started working out how the lines behave. Every published book on astrocartography, and the field holds only a handful. Then every video course I could find. Several software packages, bought and compared.
A coffee shop on Kensington Road in Calgary sits where my Venus and Sun lines cross. I met my former fiancée inside it. The building is still standing. Pure coincidence, or not. I stopped arguing with that pattern a long time ago.
What to Do After the astro.com Map Loads
Screenshot it. Then work backwards through your own life, not forwards. So pick five events that mattered. A move. One job that changed things. Some relationship that started in a specific city. Then find each place on it. Note which line sat nearest.
That calibration step is the whole game. Your Saturn is not the textbook Saturn. It is whatever showed up in the cities where you have lived. The tool hands you the visual. You supply the evidence. Meaning arrives third, and most people quit before they get there.
Twenty years ago nobody had Google Maps and we managed fine. Still, I would not drive across an unfamiliar city without it now. The free astro.com map tells you which lines exist. It will not tell you which one to book your Tuesday around.
That gap is why I develop and print the maps by hand. Midpoints drawn in. Local scale alongside the global one. Printed and digital maps both sit on the Astrotopographer home page. The wider framework runs through my astrocartography guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the astrocartography map on astro.com free?
Free, yes. Travel and Local Space both run at no cost. A subscription only enters for print-quality chart drawings. Astrodienst Plus is the other paid piece, and it strips ads and expands record storage.
Are astrodienst astrocartography and astro.com astrocartography the same?
Same tool. Astrodienst is the Swiss company behind the astro.com website. So people type both names into search. They land on the identical map. No separate astrodienst astrocartography chart exists.
Where do I find the astrocartography chart on astro.com?
Free Horoscopes, then the locational astrology section. AstroClick Travel is the world map carrying the planetary lines. Local Space is the entry underneath. Nothing there carries the word astrocartography, which is why so many people give up.
Can I download my astro.com map in PDF format?
Chart drawings in PDF format sit behind a subscription. The free view is still a screen graphic. For anything wall-sized, a printed map is a different product from a downloaded file. It holds a resolution no screenshot will.
Does the astro.com map show Chiron and the asteroids?
Not on AstroClick Travel. Ten bodies plot there, though. Sun, Moon, the planets, plus the lunar Nodes. Chiron sits outside that set, so a chart with strong Chiron placements needs a second tool or a hand-drawn overlay.
What birth data does the astrocartography chart need?
Date of birth. Exact clock time. The city you were born in. Their atlas handles coordinates and time zone once you type the place name. Guess the hour and every angle line moves. That is the field worth digging up a birth certificate for.
Why does my map look different from other free calculators?
House systems and rounding. Charts differ because calculators use different atlases, so one birth city can resolve to slightly different coordinates. Some tools also plot fewer bodies. Others draw only two angles rather than four.
Is a free astro.com map enough to plan a move?
Enough to start with, not enough to decide on. It shows you where the lines fall. Nothing there says which of them suits the specific thing you are moving for. Do not believe me either. Run your own map, check it against five places you have already lived, then judge.
What lines should I pay attention to in astrocartography?
Whichever line runs nearest a city you already lived in. Calibrate there first. Rankings come second.
One Map, and the Years After It
Go run it. The tool is free and the data takes two minutes. Worst case, you close the tab the way I did. Best case, one line explains a city that never felt right and you finally have a name for it. Years passed between my first free map and the morning it made sense. Yours might be faster. Mine was not.