Chiron
Centaur (minor planet)
The wounded healer, orbiting between Saturn and Uranus.
In the sky right now
Aries 28°37′
Ecliptic longitude 28.62°
Currently retrograde
Retrograde cycle
Chiron does spend part of each year in apparent retrograde motion, like all bodies beyond Earth's orbit — roughly five months a year. Its exact stations are not tracked in the retrograde list on this site.
Astronomy
- Discovered
- 1 November 1977, by Charles Kowal at Palomar Observatory
- Classification
- The first known centaur — both a minor planet and a comet (95P/Chiron)
- Orbital period
- 50.4 Earth years
- Orbit
- Crosses between Saturn and Uranus, 8.5 to 18.9 AU from the Sun
- Diameter
- About 218 km
- Composition
- Icy body that develops a coma near perihelion
- Rings
- Evidence for a ring system reported in 2015
Planetary facts follow NASA and JPL reference data. Moon counts reflect IAU-recognised satellites as of August 2026. Zodiacal positions and retrograde stations are calculated live using the app's VSOP87/NOVAS-derived astronomy engine rather than being hard-coded. The lunar nodes shown are True (osculating) nodes, computed from the Moon's instantaneous orbital plane — the same convention Astro.com uses by default.
Greek & Roman mythology
Greek
Cheiron (Χείρων)
Roman
No Roman equivalent — Chiron was not a god
Chiron was a centaur, but not one of the wild, drunken kind. Fathered by Cronus in the form of a horse, he was famously civilised: a healer, astronomer, prophet and teacher who tutored Asclepius, Jason, Achilles and — in some accounts — Heracles.
The wound came from Heracles, whose arrow, poisoned with Hydra's blood, struck Chiron by accident. Immortal, he could not die of it and could not be cured of it either. He eventually gave up his immortality in exchange for Prometheus's release, and Zeus placed him in the sky — traditionally as the constellation Centaurus, sometimes Sagittarius.
Chiron is a figure from Greek myth rather than a god, so there is no Roman counterpart to pair him with. Roman writers used the same name, Chiron, when retelling the Greek stories.
In a natal chart
Chiron entered astrological practice only after its 1977 discovery, making it by far the most recent addition to the standard chart.
It is read as the 'wounded healer': a place of persistent, hard-to-fix pain that becomes the source of a person's ability to help others with the same thing.
Chiron has no traditional rulership. Some modern astrologers associate it with Virgo, others with Sagittarius; neither is settled.
Explore the rest of the sky
Don't write your paper based on this page. We keep the facts as accurate as we can, but moon counts get revised, missions rewrite the textbooks, and the live positions are computed on the fly — treat this as a reliable starting point, not a real-time oracle.