Crossings
Neptune–Pluto crossing
Your generation's pair, not your own. Where a Neptune line crosses a Pluto line on your map, both planets were on angles at the moment you were born, and the latitude through that point is a Neptune–Pluto paran.
On this page
What the Neptune–Pluto crossing means
Neptune and Pluto are the two slowest bodies on the map, and everyone born from the 1940s to now has them in the same long sextile. Their paran latitudes depend only on where the two planets stood in the sky, and over a few weeks those places barely change, so someone born the month before you has nearly the same Neptune–Pluto paran latitudes as you do. It's a latitude you share with the rest of your school year.
The Neptune–Pluto crossing points are a little more personal. Where they fall still depends on your birth moment, because the turning Earth sets the lines, so your Neptune MC crossing Pluto's Ascendant sits somewhere other than a classmate's born at a different hour. What astrocartography reads there is collective: ideals and the hidden forces under them, causes, faiths, markets and the moods of a crowd, with Neptune blurring and Pluto digging.
Don't choose a city for this pair alone. Look for a personal planet near it: a Moon or Venus line through the same place carries those generational themes into your home or your love life, and a Sun or Mars line puts them into your own work. Without one, the crossing stays in the background.
Where they meet on your map
Your Neptune MC and IC lines run from pole to pole, and so do your Pluto ones, so those four never meet. Each of them crosses the other planet's rising and setting curve once, which makes up to four crossings of a meridian line with a horizon line, and the rising and setting curves of the two can cross each other as well. Where they fall depends on the moment you were born: every chart has them, though some land in the middle of an ocean or too near a pole to be drawn.
At a crossing both planets were on angles in the same place at the same moment. Move east or west along that latitude and the same two still reach their angles together, only at another time of day, so astrocartography reads the whole latitude as a Neptune–Pluto paran. Zenith Map draws it as a band 1° (about 110 km) either side, and its weight in a place's score fades with distance from the latitude.
Birth time
A wrong birth time moves every line, and the crossings with them: an hour's error puts each crossing 15° of longitude east or west, more than 1,600 km at the equator. The paran latitude hardly moves, because it depends on where the two planets were in the sky rather than on the time of day; in the engine's test charts an hour shifts it by about a tenth of a degree or less nine times out of ten. With an uncertain birth time, trust the paran before the crossing. What a doubtful birth time does to a map.
Questions
Is the Neptune–Pluto crossing personal?
Only in where it falls. The two planets move so slowly that their paran latitudes are nearly the same for everyone born within a few weeks of each other, and the pair has been in a sextile for everyone born since the 1940s. The crossing points shift with each birth moment, but what they mean for you comes through the personal planets nearby.
Why do people born weeks apart share a Neptune–Pluto paran?
A paran latitude depends only on where the two bodies stood in the sky, and Neptune and Pluto move about a degree a month at most, often far less. Anyone born within a few weeks of you has them in almost the same places, and so on almost the same latitudes. The time of day moves the crossing points but not those latitudes.
Neptune and Pluto lines and the paran bands are drawn with Pro; the free map shows the Sun, Moon, Venus and Jupiter.