The engines

Astrocartography: your lines on the world map

August 11, 2026·5 min read

If your natal chart tells you how you work, astrocartography tells you where. It's the same chart projected onto the globe: each planet traces lines, and being near one of those lines amplifies what that planet represents for you.

How the lines are formed

At the moment you were born, each planet was rising somewhere on Earth, setting somewhere else, and culminating overhead in a third place. Connecting those points gives you four lines per planet.

MC (Midheaven)
Where that planet was at its peak: public life, career, recognition.
IC (Imum Coeli)
The opposite: home, roots, private life.
ASC (Ascendant)
Where it was rising: how you come across, how others perceive you.
DSC (Descendant)
Where it was setting: relationships, encounters, the other person.

Ten planets times four lines makes forty lines on the world map. The useful question isn't "where are my lines?" but "what's near the place I'm thinking of going?"

Precision, which here is everything

MC and IC lines are meridians: vertical and simple. ASC and DSC lines, on the other hand, are curves, and their longitude changes with latitude. Many tools approximate them by sampling a few points and joining them with straight segments, a method that at certain latitudes is off by several degrees. That's hundreds of kilometers.

Ollin samples them to draw the map, but when you need a precise answer about a city, it calculates the exact longitudes at that latitude. If you ask "how far is Lisbon from my Jupiter line?", the distance is calculated, not eyeballed on the map.

Parans: where two lines meet

A paran is a latitude where two different planets touch one of the angles at the same time. It isn't a vertical line but a horizontal band, and it applies along its entire length: there can be significant parans even where no planetary line passes.

They're the least talked-about part of astrocartography and often the most interesting, because they explain why certain seemingly neutral places still feel charged. Ollin draws them on the map alongside the lines.

The relocated chart

There's a more direct way to answer "what would my life be like there?": recalculate your entire natal chart for the exact same moment of your birth, but in that place. The planets stay where they are. The houses change.

It's a powerful reading because it shows how the areas of your life shift: the same Saturn that weighs on your work at home might land on your relationships in another city. Ollin calculates it for any city in the world, and you can ask for it directly in the chat.

A caveat we always make: astrocartography doesn't tell you where you'll be happy. It describes which themes get amplified where. A Saturn line isn't a place to avoid. It's a place where certain things get more serious, and for some people that's exactly what they need.