How exact are the planets on your chart?
Every astro date on a chart starts as a planet's position. Get the position slightly wrong and the date moves: by hours for the Moon, by days for Saturn. Here is how far a shortcut formula drifts, measured, and what PyraTime uses instead.
PyraTime6 min readUpdated October 2026
01A degree is a date
An aspect, an ingress or a planetary line on price is a moment when a planet reaches a particular place in the sky. If the software has the planet in the wrong place, it finds the right moment at the wrong time. How wrong depends on how fast the planet is moving.
The Moon moves about 13° a day, so every degree of error is roughly two hours: enough to put a lunar event on the wrong bar of an intraday chart. Saturn usually moves less than a tenth of a degree a day, and almost not at all when it turns around, so even a tenth of a degree of error can be a day or more. On a daily chart, that is a different candle.
02Where TradingView's planets come from
TradingView has no planets built in. The astro indicators there are community scripts written in Pine Script, and Pine can't read an ephemeris file: the precise tables of where the planets are that observatories publish. So each script works the positions out from a shortcut formula, or from numbers its author pasted into the code.
That isn't a fault in TradingView, and some authors do careful work. But the accuracy of the dates you see depends entirely on which shortcut the author chose and how much of it they kept, and the script rarely tells you.
03What a shortcut gets wrong
We took one of the most widely published shortcuts, Paul Schlyter's “How to compute planetary positions”, and checked it against NASA JPL's DE440 ephemeris every day of Bitcoin's price history: 4,657 days, from January 2014 to October 2026. The formula comes in two forms. The plain one is what you get from the orbital elements alone; the second adds the correction terms Schlyter lists for the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn, which shorter scripts tend to drop.
| Body | Plain formula | With correction terms | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typical | Worst | Date off by | Typical | Worst | Date off by | |
| Moon13° a day | 0.77° | 2.4° | 1.4 h · 2.9 h | 0.02° | 0.10° | 3 min · 6 min |
| Jupiter0.13° a day | 0.02° | 0.07° | 3 h · 19 h | 0.01° | 0.02° | 1.6 h · 5 h |
| Saturn0.07° a day | 0.10° | 0.22° | 1.6 days · 7 days | 0.01° | 0.03° | 3.7 h · 22 h |
Two things stand out. The plain formula has the Moon three-quarters of a degree out on a typical day and well over two degrees at worst, which moves lunar times by hours. And Saturn's tenth of a degree turns into a day and a half on a typical day and a week or more one day in ten, when Saturn is close to turning around and barely moving.
The correction terms fix most of it, which is the point: the same formula can be good or poor depending on what the author kept. The Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars stay within 0.03° either way, so their dates move by an hour or less.
04What PyraTime uses
PyraTime Studio doesn't use a shortcut. It reads positions from JPL DE440, one of the ephemerides NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory produces for navigating spacecraft, through the Skyfield astronomy library. It is the same reference the table above is measured against.
Every astro feature in Studio works from it: planetary lines on price, aspect and ingress dates, retrograde bands, the zodiac wheel, and the Coming up panel, which lists the next events with exact times.
Precision doesn't make a planet move a price. What it does is make sure that when you draw a Saturn line or test a lunar date, you are looking at Saturn and the Moon, not at a formula's error.
05Check the script you use
You don't have to take our word for any of this. Pick a date from the astro script you use, such as a new moon or a Saturn aspect, and look the same event up in an almanac or in NASA's free JPL Horizons service. If the times agree to within a few minutes, the script is careful. If they are hours apart for the Moon, or a day apart for Saturn, you now know why.