♄ Saturn’s cycles
Saturn comes back to the same place relative to the Sun about every 378 days, not quite two weeks longer than a year. It rises out of the Sun’s glare in the dawn sky, and as the Earth comes round to overtake it, it slows, stops and runs backwards for about four and a half months—a retrograde—with opposition in the middle: Saturn up all night, at its closest and brightest. Then it turns forward again and sinks into the evening twilight to meet the Sun. It takes about twenty-nine and a half years to go once round the zodiac, two and a half years in each sign.
Why it runs backward
The retrograde is a trick of perspective—as with Mars and Jupiter, it’s the Earth doing the overtaking. Saturn is so far out and moves so slowly that we pass it every year, and for four and a half months it seems to slide backwards against the stars.
Around the zodiac
Saturn spends about two and a half years in each sign, and comes back to the same part of the sky every 29 years.
| ♈︎ | ♉︎ | ♊︎ | ♋︎ | ♌︎ | ♍︎ | ♎︎ | ♏︎ | ♐︎ | ♑︎ | ♒︎ | ♓︎ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | ||||||||||||
| 2026 | ||||||||||||
| 2055 |