The transit of about forty-two
When Uranus reaches the far side of your chart
Eighty-four years to go round the sun, so halfway is forty-two. This is the one the phrase “midlife crisis” was borrowed from, and the one most calculators for it do not calculate.
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What is actually happening
Uranus takes eighty-four years to complete an orbit. Half of that is forty-two, so a little after your forty-first birthday Uranus arrives at the point in the sky directly opposite where it stood when you were born. It is the only transit here you can be sure of meeting exactly once, and only once, in a life.
Its orbit is slightly out of round, so the age is not identical for everyone. Across the birth dates this calculator accepts it falls between about 38 and 45 — a real spread, and the reason a table of typical ages is not the same thing as an answer.
Once, or three times
Most people get three passes: Uranus crosses the opposite degree, turns retrograde and crosses back, then turns again and crosses a third time. A minority get a single clean pass, because the exact degree happened to fall well clear of a turning point. Both are normal, and which one you get is not a matter of degree or intensity — it is geometry.
What astrologers make of it
An opposition is the aspect of confrontation: two things at maximum distance, each in full view of the other. Uranus carries associations of disruption, sudden clarity, and the refusal of arrangements that have stopped fitting. Put together, the traditional reading is of a person meeting the opposite of what they set out to be, and having to decide what to do about it.
The popular version of this is the sports car and the exit from a marriage, which is mostly a joke about men. The literature is broader and more interesting than the joke, and considerably older than it.
None of that is a prediction. What is on this page is a date, computed from an orbit.
This is astrology, not medicine. Nothing here describes, diagnoses or predicts anything about your health, and it is no substitute for talking to a doctor.
The rest of the sequence
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How this is worked out
Positions come from the same engine that draws the charts on this site, checked against NASA's JPL Horizons. Chiron, which most astrology software licenses, is a table fetched straight from Horizons. Every date is worked out in your browser — your date of birth is never sent anywhere, and nothing is stored.