When Pluto turns a quarter of the way round

Why there is no typical age for this

Pluto's orbit is the least circular of anything on this site. It runs from about 30 times the Earth's distance from the sun out to 49, which means its apparent speed varies by a factor of several across a single orbit. It was moving quickly through the 1980s and 1990s and is slowing down now.

A quarter of Pluto's orbit is not therefore a quarter of Pluto's 248-year period. It is however long Pluto happens to take to cover that particular ninety degrees, which depends entirely on which ninety degrees they are — and that depends on your birth year. Measured across the range this calculator accepts:

• born in the mid-1960s or 1970s, it arrives at about 35 or 36
• born in the mid-1940s, at about 41
• born in the mid-1930s, at about 46
• born in the mid-1920s, at about 51
• born in the 2000s, in the middle fifties or later

So it is a midlife transit for people born roughly between 1950 and 1990, and something else for everyone either side. Any page that gives you a single typical age for this one has not computed it.

What is actually happening

Pluto reaches the point ninety degrees on from where it stood at your birth — the first hard angle it makes to itself, and the only one most people live to see. As with the others it usually happens three times, and for a good number of birth dates five, because Pluto spends nearly half of every year appearing to move backwards.

What astrologers make of it

Pluto's associations are with what is not negotiable: power, compulsion, whatever a person cannot simply decide to stop doing, and the slow business of an old arrangement ending before a new one is visible. A square is friction. The reading of this transit is therefore about the point where something structural gives.

As everywhere on this site, that is offered as a vocabulary rather than a forecast. The dates are the claim being made here.