Yod and Mystic Rectangle Dates 2026–2028 (Sky Patterns)

A yod is in orb on 28 October 2026: Uranus and Neptune in sextile, with the Sun at the apex, in orb 25–28 October 2026, so today is its last day in the count. The next figure will be another yod, Saturn and Uranus with the Sun at the apex, 30–31 October 2026. Over 2026 to 2028 the sky forms 44 yods (19 beginning in 2026, 16 beginning in 2027 and 9 beginning in 2028) and seven mystic rectangles (three in 2026, two in 2027 and two in 2028), under the orbs set out below.

The rows come from an hourly run of the JPL DE421 ephemeris over the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, in Indian Standard Time. The Moon is not in the search: it moves about 13° a day, so any figure it completed would come and go within a day or so. Each row is one unbroken stretch of hours in which every leg of the figure stays inside its orb, which makes the ends good to the hour; only the dates are printed. Under “Tightest”, each row gives the worst leg’s closest approach to exact within the stretch and the date it came; the sign columns are read on that date.

The Two Figures as Geometry

Western chart-pattern writers define a yod as two bodies in sextile, 60° apart, that are each 150° from a third body, which they call the apex. The 150° angle is the quincunx, which modern Western lists of aspects also call the inconjunct. The three arcs, 60°, 150° and 150°, close the circle, so the apex stands directly across from the midpoint of the sextile. A mystic rectangle, in the same modern Western vocabulary, is four bodies forming two oppositions whose ends are joined alternately by sextiles and trines: going round, 60°, 120°, 60°, 120°. Both are pure angle conditions, so a table of them is a table of when the bodies stood at those separations, and nothing more.

The orbs are this page’s choice. Sextiles, trines and oppositions count within 6° of exact; the quincunx legs of a yod are held to 3°. For comparison, the English Wikipedia list of aspects gives the quincunx about 3.5°, depending on the bodies. A different choice changes the census a great deal. With the quincunx legs also allowed 6°, the yod list grows from 25 distinct sets of three bodies to 30, and the days in orb, summed over all stretches, go from about 208 to about 643. The five additions are Venus–Jupiter with Neptune at the apex (26 November – 8 December 2026); Venus–Neptune with Mars at the apex (27 February – 1 March 2027); Mars–Jupiter with Neptune at the apex (7–18 September 2027); Venus–Jupiter with Saturn at the apex (22–29 October 2027); Mars–Saturn with Jupiter at the apex (30 January – 9 February 2028). The number of stretches rises less, from 44 to 48, partly because the wider orb fuses four pairs of short stretches into single long ones: the Uranus–Neptune yod with Venus at the apex, for one, holds 14–22 September 2026 and 16–22 October 2026 at 3° but runs unbroken 10 September – 27 October 2026 at 6°.

Mystic Rectangles 2026–2028

All seven stand on one slow side: the sextile between Neptune and Pluto, exact six times in these years (25 July 2026, 16 September 2026, 29 June 2027, 16 October 2027, 9 June 2028 and 8 November 2028). Neptune is in tropical Aries and Pluto in tropical Aquarius in every row. A rectangle forms when two faster bodies, themselves about 60° apart, reach the two points opposite Neptune and Pluto at the same time. The bodies that do so are Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, the Sun and Mars; Jupiter is one of the pair in three of the seven. The tightest is Mercury, Venus, Pluto, Neptune, in orb 8–15 August 2026 and reaching 1.31°. The longest is Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, Neptune, 8–24 September 2028, a little over a fortnight; every other one lasts less than two weeks. The rectangles of 2026 are past; the next will be the Sun, Mars, Pluto, Neptune, in orb 23 July – 4 August 2027.

Yods 2026–2028, Grouped by Their Base

32 of the 44 yods have a sextile pair made only of slow bodies, and they fall on just four pairs. A slow sextile can hold for months, and a yod closes on it each time a faster body crosses the single point 150° from both ends. That point stays in one sign throughout each group: tropical Virgo for the Neptune–Pluto base, tropical Scorpio for Uranus–Neptune and for Saturn–Uranus, tropical Virgo again for Saturn–Pluto. The commonest base is Neptune–Pluto, with 14 yods, nearly a third of the list, and at least one in each of the three years. Its apexes are Venus, the Sun, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter.

The Saturn–Uranus yods sit at the loose end of the table: none gets closer than 4.39°. Since the quincunx legs are held to 3°, that worst leg is the sextile itself. Saturn and Uranus were exact in sextile on 20 January 2026 and are more than 4° from exact in every one of these stretches. Lengths vary a lot across the whole list: three last less than a day, and one of those begins and ends on the same date.

Venus is the commonest apex, with 10 of the 44, every one of them on a slow base; Mars comes next with 9. Each of the nine bodies is an apex at least once except Uranus, which appears only in the sextile pair. On a slow base the apex is always the Sun, Mercury, Venus or Mars, with one exception, below.

A Worked Example: Neptune, Pluto and Jupiter in 2027

For the “example of a yod” that searches ask for, this page takes the one with Jupiter at the apex. Neptune in tropical Aries and Pluto in tropical Aquarius are in sextile; Jupiter, in tropical Virgo, sits within 3° of 150° from each. The figure holds 11 August – 2 September 2027, the longest of all 44 at about three weeks, because Jupiter moves far more slowly than the Sun, Mercury, Venus or Mars and takes longer to cross the apex point. Its tightest, 0.76°, comes on 21 August 2027. In Lahiri labels the same three bodies are in Pisces, Capricorn and Leo.

Mars shows a different pattern on the same base. It reaches the apex point three times in a row: 27 November – 8 December 2026, 7–14 February 2027 and 25 May – 6 June 2027. The middle stretch falls inside Mars’s retrograde of 10 January 2027 to 1 April 2027; the first ends before the retrograde begins and the third starts after it ends. The Mars retrograde dates page lists that window with its signs. The tightest yod of the whole census is also a Neptune–Pluto yod with Mars at the apex: 30 October – 10 November 2028, reaching 0.10° on 4 November 2028.

Same Angles, Different Sign Labels

A sextile or a quincunx is a separation in degrees, and moving every body by the same ayanamsa leaves the separations exactly as they were, so the dates in both tables are identical in a tropical and a Lahiri almanac. What changes is the sign names. In most rows each body’s Lahiri sign is the sign before its tropical one, and the labels fit the shape on both sides: for a yod, the pair two signs apart and the apex five signs from each.

Three rows break that, each because at least one body sits late in its tropical sign and so carries the same name in both zodiacs. Every yod fits the sign shape in tropical labels, but two do not in Lahiri ones: the Sun–Saturn yod with Jupiter at the apex (12–17 February 2028) and the Mercury–Saturn yod with Jupiter at the apex (6–10 March 2028). In the second, for instance, the tropical labels read Aquarius, Aries → Virgo, while Lahiri reads Capricorn, Aries → Leo, with Saturn in Aries in both. The mystic rectangles go the other way. Each fits in Lahiri, but in the 23–30 September 2026 one, Mars and Pluto stand within 6° of 180° while carrying the tropical labels Cancer and Aquarius, which are not opposite signs; Lahiri puts them in Cancer and Capricorn, which are.

How Graha Drishti Counts Instead

Neither figure has a counterpart in the Vedic aspect scheme. As the graha drishti page sets it out, a graha aspects whole signs counted from its own, with no degrees and no orb, and the table has rows for the seven grahas and the nodes only, none for Uranus, Neptune or Pluto. Every rectangle and 37 of the 44 yods include at least one of those three. In sign terms, a body 60° ahead usually stands in the 3rd sign and one 60° behind in the 11th; 150° ahead is usually the 6th sign and 150° behind the 8th. Of the seven grahas, only Saturn aspects the 3rd and only Mars the 8th, and none aspects the 6th or the 11th. So even the seven yods made only of grahas are not drishti relations as a whole; the scheme simply does not draw this shape.

For the other multi-body figures of these years, see the grand trine and T-square dates, read off the same kind of hourly DE421 run at the same 6° orb; the slow sextiles that carry most of the figures here are dated one by one on the outer-planet aspects page; and for bodies bunched in a single sign instead of spread round the circle, the stellium dates have the list.

What Comes Next

Of the 44 yods, 9 have already come and gone this year, one is in orb today and 34 are still to come. After 30–31 October 2026, the next yod on the Neptune–Pluto base will begin on 27 November 2026, with Mars at the apex, the first of the three Mars passes. No mystic rectangle will form for the rest of 2026; the next is due 23 July – 4 August 2027.

What This Page Does Not Give

Many searches for these figures ask what a yod or a rectangle signifies, for a birth chart, a sign or the world. This page answers none of that. It measures where nine bodies stood relative to each other, and those separations hold whatever reading anyone attaches to them, so a list of dates cannot confirm or refute one. Nicknames carried by the figures in astrological writing are left out for the same reason, and so are times of day, which shift with the orb chosen. Figures of other names built on other angles are not searched for here.

In Brief

• Census 2026 to 2028: 44 yods (quincunx legs within 3°, sextile within 6°) and seven mystic rectangles (every leg within 6°)
• Today, 28 October 2026: the Uranus–Neptune yod with the Sun at the apex, last day; next, Saturn–Uranus with the Sun, 30–31 October 2026
• Rectangles: every one on the Neptune–Pluto sextile; next 23 July – 4 August 2027
• Yods: 32 of 44 on a slow sextile, 14 on Neptune–Pluto; Venus the commonest apex (10); longest 11 August – 2 September 2027 with Jupiter at the apex
• At a 6° quincunx orb: 30 sets of bodies instead of 25, and about 643 days in orb instead of 208
• Zodiacs: same dates in both; sign labels differ, usually by one sign