The sky on Monday, May 31, 2027

Sun in	Gemini
Moon in	Aries
Moon phase	Waning Crescent
Illumination	22%
Exact aspects	Venus square Jupiter
Mercury retrograde	No

Venus and Jupiter stand about ninety degrees apart today, a square, which astrologers read as friction between two ways of moving. The Moon is in Aries, 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.