Black Moon Lilith Sign by Date of Birth, 1950–2050

Black Moon Lilith is not a body in the sky. The Moon’s orbit round the Earth is an ellipse, and an ellipse has a near end, the perigee, and a far end, the apogee. Seen from the Earth, the apogee lies in one direction along the zodiac, and that direction is what Western astrologers call Black Moon Lilith. The name and its use belong to Western astrology. Vedic jyotish has no such point: it is not a graha, and no Parashari text the site draws on uses it.

The direction turns slowly. Averaged over the Sun’s disturbances, the apogee advances about 40.7° along the zodiac each year, so it takes about 9 months to cross one sign and about 8.8 years to go all the way round. Because it moves that slowly, a date of birth alone settles its sign except on a change day, and the tables below give every change from 1950 to 2050 as a date in Indian Standard Time.

Mean Lilith and Osculating (“True”) Lilith

Calculators that ask for a date of birth disagree about Lilith because two different points go by the one name.

• Mean Lilith is the apogee of an averaged orbit. It moves smoothly forward, never backward, and here it is computed with the polynomial for the Moon’s mean perigee in Jean Meeus’s Astronomical Algorithms, turned through 180°. Every stay in a sign from 1950 to 2050 lasts 269 or 270 days, and in each calendar year the point changes sign once or twice.
• Osculating Lilith, which software often labels “true”, is the apogee of the ellipse that fits the Moon’s actual position and velocity at one instant. The Sun’s pull reshapes that ellipse all the time, so the point swings to either side of the mean one. Here it is computed from the JPL DE421 ephemeris, once a day at 05:30 IST.

Over the 36,890 daily samples, the osculating point averages +0.0014° from the mean one. That near-zero figure is the check on both computations, since the mean orbit is built to follow the long-run average of the actual ones: the generator would not write the data unless it came out under 0.05°. The swing around that average is large, though:

So on 36.3% of days, more than one day in three, a mean-Lilith calculator and a true-Lilith calculator name different signs for the same birth date. The largest gap, 30.15°, is a little more than the width of a whole sign. And where the mean point changes sign once or twice a year, the osculating point, counted on the daily samples, changes between 21 and 30 times, 26 in 2027, crossing back and forth over the same boundary as it swings. That is why this page gives sign dates for the mean point only: a date list for the osculating point would be a list of short visits back and forth across the same boundary. Some programs offer further variants again, often labelled “interpolated” or “natural” apogee; this page computes neither.

Where Mean Lilith Is in 2026 and 2027

On 28 October 2026 mean Lilith is in tropical Capricorn, which it entered on 15 September 2026. It will enter Aquarius on 12 June 2027 and Pisces on 7 March 2028. In the sidereal zodiac with the Lahiri ayanamsa it is in Sagittarius, entered on or about 26 July 2026 (a near-midnight change, so the day before or after is also possible), and will enter Capricorn on 21 April 2027 and Aquarius on 15 January 2028.

Today is also one of the days the two definitions part company. At 05:30 IST the mean point stands at 4.7° Capricorn and the osculating point at 11.4° Sagittarius, 23.3° behind it and one sign back. A gap of more than 20° is the larger kind, found on about one day in six. A calculator set to true Lilith therefore prints Sagittarius today where one set to mean Lilith prints Capricorn.

Two Worked Births

Two illustrative dates, both read at 05:30 IST. The sidereal figure is the tropical one less the Lahiri ayanamsa for that day.

On 15 August 1990 the osculating point is 13.6° ahead of the mean one, yet both are in Sagittarius tropically and Scorpio sidereally, because the mean point had entered tropical Sagittarius only on 31 July 1990. On 3 January 2001 the gap is 9.7° and again the two agree, on Aquarius and Capricorn. In both cases the date tables below give the same signs: find the period that contains the birth date.

Tropical and Sidereal Lilith

Western software prints Lilith in the tropical zodiac, counted from the March equinox. Readers who use the sidereal zodiac can take the second table. The two are offset by the ayanamsa, about 24° today and a little less than one sign throughout, and at the mean point’s pace that offset takes about 7 months to cover: across the century the sidereal point enters each sign between 208 and 221 days after the tropical point entered it, 214 days on average. As a result the sidereal sign is one sign back from the tropical sign on 79.6% of days and the same sign on the other 20.4%; on no day of the span are they two signs apart. The Lahiri ayanamsa page gives the value year by year and what else the offset moves, and the Ophiuchus constellation dates page sets out why signs, tropical or sidereal, are not the constellations of the same names.

Mean Lilith Sign Dates, 1950–2050 (Tropical)

Each row runs from the IST date the mean point enters a sign to the date it enters the next; a birth on the boundary date itself needs the time of birth. Of the 137 entries, 23 fall within two hours of midnight IST and are marked “near midnight”: for those, check the day either side, since a slightly different formula for the mean orbit could move the change across midnight.

Sidereal (Lahiri) Mean Lilith Dates

The same point with the Lahiri ayanamsa subtracted, read in the same way. 24 of the 137 entries are near midnight.

The Other Orbital Points, and the Moon’s Own Apogee

The Moon’s orbit has two more points that astrologers use: the nodes, where the orbit crosses the Sun’s path. Unlike the apogee, these are part of jyotish, as Rahu and Ketu, and they have the same split between a smooth mean point and a wobbling true one. The site’s node tables follow the mean node, and the Rahu–Ketu transit 2026–2028 page measures how far a true-node almanac can move a sign-change date.

The supermoon page also talks about apogee, in a different sense: there it is the moment each month when the Moon itself is farthest away, with its distance in kilometres, whereas Lilith is the direction of the orbit’s far end, which exists whether or not the Moon is there. The Venus sign by date of birth page is the same kind of date lookup for a graha, in sidereal signs, read off the DE421 ephemeris.

What This Page Does Not Give

No reading of Lilith in any sign or house. The arithmetic here finds where a point of the orbit lies; nothing in it could test what that position is supposed to say about a person, so the page offers no interpretation either way. No house, either: the house Lilith falls in depends on the birth time, the place and the house system, and the page computes none of them. No clock time for any change, and no sign dates for the osculating point, for the reasons above.

In Brief

• What it is: the apogee direction of the Moon’s orbit, named Black Moon Lilith in Western astrology; not a graha
• Pace: mean Lilith spends 269 or 270 days in each sign and circles the zodiac in about 8.8 years
• Now: tropical Capricorn until 12 June 2027, sidereal Sagittarius until 21 April 2027
• Mean against true: different tropical signs on 36.3% of days, at most 30.15° apart
• Sidereal: one sign back from tropical on 79.6% of days, never two