The sky on Monday, August 2, 2027
| Sun in | Leo |
|---|---|
| Moon in | Leo |
| Moon phase | New Moon |
| Illumination | 0% |
| Ingresses | Mercury enters Leo |
| Exact aspects | Sun sextile Mars |
| Mercury retrograde | No |
Mercury enters Leo today and begins a new chapter of its cycle there. Sun and Mars stand about sixty degrees apart today, a sextile, traditionally read as an easy, cooperative angle. The Moon is in Leo, near new and all but invisible beside the Sun.
What is a sextile in astrology?
A sextile is a sixty degree angle between two bodies, two signs apart, and it reads as an opportunity that has to be picked up rather than one that arrives on its own.
Sixty degrees is a third of the way to an opposition, and it connects signs of compatible elements: fire with air, earth with water. That is why the traditional reading is cooperative rather than tense.
The classical distinction between a sextile and a trine is effort. A trine tends to happen to you; a sextile is available if you do something with it.
That makes the sextile one of the easier aspects to use deliberately, and one of the easiest to sleep through.