Best places by theme

Deciding where to live? Start with the where to live guide: a step by step method to rank cities by theme, compare up to three and weigh them against real life. This page explains the themes themselves.

How the best places list works

Enter your birth date, time and place in the Birth tab, then open Best places and pick a theme. The map keeps the lines astrologers connect with that theme, dims all the others, and lists the 20 nearest cities with more than 250,000 people, each with the line it sits closest to and the distance in kilometers and miles.

You choose how far from a line a city may be: up to 200 km (125 mi), 400 km (250 mi) or 700 km (435 mi). The narrow setting gives you a short, strict list. The wide one brings in cities that some astrologers would still count and others would not.

Click a city and the map flies there and opens its reading: the five nearest lines with distance and compass direction, any parans at its latitude, and the relocated Ascendant and Midheaven. From there, "Add to compare" puts it next to up to two other places in the Compare tab.

The list only shows large cities because it is meant as a starting point. A small town on the same line is just as close to it: click any point on the map to read it.

The five themes and their lines

Each theme is built from the angle that matches the area of life, then from the planets tradition links with it. The Descendant (DC) is the angle of partners, so love is mostly DC lines. The Midheaven (MC) is public life, so career is all MC lines. The IC is home and roots, and the Ascendant (AC) is the self and how you come across.

Theme	Lines it uses	Often described as
Love	Venus DC and AC, Jupiter DC, Sun DC, Moon DC, North Node DC	Meeting people, affection, partnership
Career	Sun MC, Jupiter MC, Venus MC, Mercury MC, Mars MC	Visibility, reputation, public direction
Home	Moon IC, Venus IC, Jupiter IC, Sun IC	Roots, family, a base that feels like yours
Fresh start	Sun AC, Jupiter AC, Venus AC, Mars AC, North Node AC	Confidence, a new image, momentum
Luck and travel	All four Jupiter lines, Mercury AC and DC, Uranus AC	Learning, curiosity, wider horizons

The app has a sixth button, Handle with care. It shows the Saturn and Pluto lines, Mars IC and DC, Neptune DC and Uranus IC and DC. It is not a list of places to avoid. Tradition reads these as lines that ask for more effort, patience or honesty, and astrologers often see a Saturn line, for example, as a good place to build something that lasts.

Which theme should you start with?

Start with the question you are actually trying to answer. Weighing a job offer in another city points to the career list. Looking for somewhere to settle down points to home. If you are simply curious, run all five and note the cities that come up more than once.

A city that appears under two themes is not automatically better, but it does tell you something: two different lines, with two different stories, run nearby. Click it and read both. Then check whether a Handle with care line also sits close, because tradition reads a place as the mix of everything around it, not as one line alone.

What the list cannot tell you

The list knows nothing about rent, visas, language, climate, jobs, schools or where your family lives, and those usually decide whether a place works for you. Treat astrocartography as one input among many. It is most useful for ranking or questioning places on a shortlist you already built from practical facts.

No line promises an outcome. Tradition reads a Venus line as pleasant and sociable, not as a guarantee of romance, and a city with no lines nearby is not empty: some astrologers read it as a neutral, calmer setting. Read how to read your map for the basics.

How close counts

Astrologers do not agree on one distance. When you click a place, the map labels each line very close (under 150 km), close (under 500 km) or in the wider area (under 1,000 km), so you can see how strong a reading tradition would give it.

Your birth time matters more than any setting. The Earth turns 1 degree every 4 minutes, so a birth time that is 4 minutes off moves every line by about 111 km at the equator. If you are not sure of your time, choose how sure you are in the Birth tab and the map shades the zone where each line can fall.