The Body Graph is not calculated from a single position: it reads thirteen bodies of the solar system, and it reads them twice. The right-hand column gives the sky at the exact moment of your birth; the left-hand one, in red, the sky of roughly eighty-eight days earlier. Thirteen positions, two readings: twenty-six activations, and that is all the chart is made of.
The thirteen do not carry equal weight. The Sun alone holds most of what the system attributes to the sky; the Earth faces it; the two Nodes are not bodies but crossing points of orbits, which is precisely why they speak of direction rather than matter. The slow planets, for their part, move so little from one year to the next that they activate whole generations rather than individuals.
The same bodies keep turning after your birth: that is what is called transit. Your chart, however, no longer moves. Transit therefore meets a fixed map, and what it touches first are your open centres, where nothing is already defined.
Each page below takes one body, says what it stands for in this reading, and where to find it on your two columns.
Click a planet to discover its influence in Human Design
The 3D planet textures are provided by Solar System Scope under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Textures by Solar System ScopeJPL DE430 ephemerides (NASA), conversions ported from ERFA
JPL DE430 ephemerides