How common is each rising sign, by latitude

Key findings

• At the equator every rising sign is almost equally common. The rarest (Aries, Virgo, Libra and Pisces) take 7.8% of charts each and the commonest (Gemini, Cancer, Sagittarius and Capricorn) 8.9%, a ratio of 1.15.
• The spread grows with latitude. In the northern hemisphere the rarest rising signs are Aries and Pisces, exactly tied at every latitude from 1° to 65° N: 5.9% each at 30° N, 4.5% at 45° N, 3.6% at 52° N (London, Berlin), 2.0% at 60° N (Helsinki, Oslo) and 0.6% at 65° N. The rarest sign drops below 5% from 41° N, below 2% from 61° N and below 1% from 64° N.
• From 23° N up the commonest rising sign is always one of the four from Leo to Scorpio (nearer the equator Cancer and Sagittarius lead), and the four stay within 0.7 points of each other: Virgo and Libra lead at 52° N with 11.9%, Leo and Scorpio at 60° N with 13.6%. The commonest-to-rarest ratio passes 2 at 39° N, reaches 3.3 at 52° N, 6.7 at 60° N, passes 10 at 63° N and is 26.5 at 65° N.
• In the southern hemisphere the table is the same with every sign replaced by its opposite: at 30° S the rarest rising signs are Libra and Virgo, with the 5.9% that Aries and Pisces have at 30° N, while Aries and Pisces take 9.6% each — the share of Libra and Virgo in the north. Verified by direct computation at 30° S and 52° S: the largest difference is 0.00 points.
• In the sidereal (Lahiri) zodiac the Aries–Pisces tie breaks: Pisces is the rarest at every latitude from 1° N up (3.5% at 52° N against 4.4% for Aries), and the commonest place is shared between Gemini, Scorpio, Cancer and Libra depending on latitude.
• The shares are shares of sidereal time, not of births, but the two are close: if every birth in a year happened at the same clock hour, no sign’s share would move by more than 0.34 points; a ±10% seasonality of births alone moves nothing by more than 0.02 points; both together, at most 1.74 points (at 65° N, on the largest signs). Details in the robustness section.

Method

At a fixed latitude the Ascendant depends on one number only: the local sidereal time, expressed as the right ascension of the Midheaven (ARMC). Over a full year the ARMC at any fixed clock time sweeps the whole 360° circle, so across a population of births the ARMC is close to uniformly distributed even though births cluster by hour of the day. A uniform sweep of the ARMC is therefore the model of “all charts” at a latitude, and the share of a sign is also its rising time: a sign with a share of 5% is on the eastern horizon for 5% of the sidereal day, 72 sidereal minutes.

• ARMC swept from 0° to 360° in steps of 0.01°, offset by half a step so the Ascendant never lands exactly on a sign boundary: 36,000 charts per latitude, at every integer latitude from 0° to 65° N.
• Ascendant from swisseph.houses_armc (Swiss Ephemeris 2.10.03): pure spherical geometry, no ephemeris files, no planets, no date besides the obliquity.
• Obliquity of the ecliptic: the true obliquity on 2026-01-01, 23.4381°. Sidereal comparison: the Lahiri ayanamsa of the same date (24.2203°) subtracted from every longitude. Both constants are the ones used by the MC study on this site.
• “Rising sign” is the sign of the Ascendant. The share of a sign is the fraction of the sweep during which it rises; the rising time in hours is that fraction of the 24-hour sidereal day.
• Grid check: below the polar circle the Ascendant moves monotonically with the ARMC, so the share of a sign is exactly the ARMC interval between the moments its two boundaries rise — a closed form with no grid at all. At 0°, 30°, 45°, 52°, 60°, 65° N the grid reproduces it to within 0.007 points in both zodiacs.
• Consistency check: the MC study’s CSV carries the same rising-sign shares in its rising_share_pct column. All 1,584 sign rows agree with this table exactly (largest difference 0.00 points tropical, 0.00 sidereal).

The script that produced every number on this page is published next to it as rising_sign_by_latitude.py. It needs Python 3 and pyswisseph, runs in about ten seconds and rewrites the data files this page and the CSV are built from; a downloaded copy writes them next to itself.

Share of each rising sign, by latitude

Tropical zodiac, northern hemisphere. Each cell is the share of all charts at that latitude with that rising sign. The table is symmetric about the 0° Aries–0° Libra axis: Aries pairs with Pisces, Taurus with Aquarius, Gemini with Capricorn, Cancer with Sagittarius, Leo with Scorpio, Virgo with Libra.

In each column the rarest sign is muted and the commonest is in gold; both are judged on the two-decimal shares of the full table below, and ties are marked together.

Rarest and commonest, with rising times

Rising times are in sidereal hours and minutes: how long the sign stays on the eastern horizon each day (a sidereal day is 23 h 56 min of clock time).

Southern hemisphere

Nothing needs to be recomputed for the south. The point of the ecliptic that rises at latitude −φ at a given sidereal time is the exact opposite of the point rising at +φ half a sidereal day later: changing the sign of the latitude and of the declination together leaves the rising condition (cos H₀ = −tan φ · tan δ) unchanged, and the opposite point has the opposite declination. A uniform sweep does not notice the half-day shift, so the share of a sign at −φ equals the share of the opposite sign at +φ — Aries ↔ Libra, Taurus ↔ Scorpio, Gemini ↔ Sagittarius, Cancer ↔ Capricorn, Leo ↔ Aquarius, Virgo ↔ Pisces — in either zodiac.

So in the south the long-rising signs are Capricorn to Gemini and the rarest Ascendants are Libra and Virgo: what Aries and Pisces are to Europe and North America, Libra and Virgo are to Australia, South Africa and most of South America.

Tropical shares. The computed southern columns and the mirrored northern columns differ by at most 0.00 points; the sidereal check at the same latitudes gives 0.00. The CSV tabulates the northern hemisphere only; for a southern latitude read the row of the opposite sign.

Sidereal zodiac (Lahiri)

Same geometry, every longitude shifted back by the ayanamsa (24.22°). The rising times of the stretches of ecliptic do not change; what changes is where the sign boundaries cut them, so the symmetry about 0° Aries is lost. At the equator, where every sign rises for exactly as long as its opposite, Virgo and Pisces tie for the rarest sidereal rising sign and Gemini and Sagittarius for the commonest; from 1° N onward the rarest is Pisces alone, and the commonest is Gemini, Scorpio, Cancer and Libra depending on latitude.

Sidereal rows for every degree are in the CSV (zodiac = sidereal_lahiri). The other common ayanamsas differ from Lahiri by up to about 1.5° (Raman; Fagan–Bradley 0.9°, Krishnamurti 0.1°): they move the boundaries, not the rising times, and shift the sidereal shares by at most about half a point.

Robustness: births are not spread evenly over the day

The sweep weights every sidereal time equally. Real births cluster by clock hour and, more weakly, by season. To measure how much that could move the table, the script takes the real sidereal time of every day of 2026 at 96 clock times (every quarter hour) and recomputes the shares under three extreme scenarios:

• All births at one clock time, spread evenly over the 365 days of the year — for each of the 96 clock times. Any distribution of births over the hours of the day is a mixture of these, so its shift is bounded by the worst of them. Largest shift of any sign’s share, over every latitude, both zodiacs and every clock time: 0.34 points, at 9° N. At a fixed clock time the sidereal time advances about 1° a day, so a year of such births still walks around the whole circle; only the 365-step graininess remains.
• Seasonality of ±10% (a cosine over the year, 12 phases) with births spread evenly over the day: at most 0.02 points. Every single day already covers the whole circle of sidereal times, so weighting days differently changes almost nothing.
• Both at once — one clock time and ±10% seasonality: at most 1.74 points. This is the one combination that matters: at a fixed clock time the season is the sidereal time, so the seasonal weighting lands directly on a stretch of the zodiac. The shift scales with the sign’s share (a ±10% weighting of a 15% sign is ±1.5 points), which is why the maximum sits at 65° N on the largest signs.

For comparison, the same year grid with equal weights differs from the continuous sweep by 0.012 points — the resolution of the check itself.

Largest absolute shift of any sign’s share in percentage points, both zodiacs. These are bounds for the scenarios named, not estimates of real birth statistics: nothing on this page uses birth records, and a real hour-of-birth distribution is far flatter than “everyone at one clock time”.

Limits of applicability

• Latitudes 0–65° only. The polar circle is at 90° − ε = 66.56° N. Up to it the Ascendant moves forward through the zodiac all day and every sign rises once a day; the shortest signs just get very short — at 66° N Aries and Pisces are down to 0.22% each. From the polar circle on, part of the ecliptic is circumpolar and the opposite part never rises. The Ascendant, as Swiss Ephemeris defines it there (the intersection of ecliptic and horizon that lies in the east), then jumps by about 180° twice a day and runs backwards through the zodiac between the jumps: at 67° N it is retrograde for 6.5% of the sidereal day, at 70° N for 18.3%, where Gemini, Cancer, Sagittarius and Capricorn never appear on the eastern horizon at all. “How often does this sign rise” stops being a single well-defined number, so the table stops at 65°.
• The shares are shares of sidereal time. A year of births spread over the day reproduces them; the robustness section bounds what hour and season clustering can do.
• Shares are per chart, not per person: nothing here uses real birth records, and real populations are not spread evenly across latitudes. Nothing here says anything about the people born under a sign — only about how often the sign is on the horizon.
• The obliquity is fixed at its 2026-01-01 value; its change over a human lifetime (about 0.01°) moves no share by more than about a hundredth of a point.
• The sidereal columns use Lahiri with the ayanamsa of 2026-01-01 applied to every chart. The ayanamsa grows by about 0.014° a year, so a chart from 1950 sits about a degree further along the zodiac; that moves the sidereal boundaries, not the rising times.