The sky on Friday, December 4, 2026

Sun in	Sagittarius
Moon in	Libra
Moon phase	Waning Crescent
Illumination	18%
Ingresses	Venus enters Scorpio
Exact aspects	Mercury square Jupiter
Mercury retrograde	No

Venus enters Scorpio today and begins a new chapter of its cycle there. Mercury and Jupiter stand about ninety degrees apart today, a square, which astrologers read as friction between two ways of moving. The Moon is in Libra, an old crescent thinning in the morning sky.

What does retrograde actually mean?

Retrograde means a planet appears to move backwards through the zodiac from where we stand, which is a trick of perspective rather than anything the planet is doing wrong.

Every planet keeps orbiting the Sun in the same direction the whole time. The apparent reversal happens when Earth and the other planet pass each other, the same way a slower car seems to slide backwards when you overtake it on the motorway. Mercury does this about three times a year, Venus about once every eighteen months, Mars about once every two years.

So a retrograde is not a curse, a punishment or a reason to cancel anything. The traditional reading is much smaller than the internet version: a slower, more inward, more revisiting version of whatever that planet normally covers. Re reading, re thinking, running into people from before.

If you want a practical use, treat a retrograde as a reason to check your own work rather than a reason to expect the world to break. The one thing it reliably describes is tempo.