Is Ophiuchus a zodiac sign?
Ophiuchus is one of the thirteen constellations the Sun passes in front of during a year, so in that sense it belongs to the zodiac. The International Astronomical Union fixed the borders of all 88 constellations in 1930, and on those borders the Sun’s path, the ecliptic, crosses the southern part of Ophiuchus for about 18 days, from late November to mid-December. That is longer than it spends in Scorpius next door, about six and a half days.
Astrology’s signs are something else. Western astrology divides the ecliptic into twelve equal signs of 30°, counted from the March equinox so that they keep step with the seasons. Vedic astrology uses twelve equal signs too, fixed to the stars instead. Neither has a place for Ophiuchus. Only 13-sign astrology, which follows the constellations themselves with all their unequal widths, makes it a sign. The 13 zodiac signs page sets the three systems side by side.
So if you were born between about November 29 and December 17, your horoscope sign is Sagittarius, your Vedic sign is Scorpio (or Sagittarius from about December 15), and the Sun was in front of the stars of Ophiuchus. The checker above settles a particular birthday.
Where the idea of a 13th sign came from
Ophiuchus is an old constellation. Ptolemy listed it among his 48 in the 2nd century, and the Greek poet Aratus had already pictured the Serpent Bearer standing with his feet on the Scorpion. The Roman poet Manilius gave it an influence in his astrological poem: people born as it rises, he wrote, are safe from snakes and poisons. But no ancient astrologer made it one of the signs, which were twelve equal divisions from the start.
The modern idea needed modern borders. Once the 1930 boundaries put a stretch of the ecliptic inside Ophiuchus, writers began to say the Sun spends part of December in a thirteenth sign.
- 1970. Steven Schmidt’s Astrology 14 proposed fourteen equal signs, adding Ophiuchus and Cetus, the Whale. Time magazine covered it, quoting astrologers who rejected it.
- 1995. Walter Berg’s The 13 Signs of the Zodiac set out a thirteen-sign zodiac that became popular in Japan. Schmidt and Berg both made Pluto the ruler of Ophiuchus.
- 2011. In January, a remark by Parke Kunkle of the Minnesota Planetarium Society about the shifting zodiac made headlines.
- 2016. A NASA page for children explained that “the Babylonians ignored the fact that the sun actually moves through 13 constellations, not 12” to match their twelve-month calendar. When it was reported as NASA changing the zodiac, NASA replied: “we didn’t change any zodiac signs… we just did the math.”
What 13-sign astrology says about Ophiuchus
There is no ancient tradition of Ophiuchus personalities, so its readings are modern and vary from one writer to the next. They lean on the figure itself: the Serpent Bearer is Asclepius, the healer of Greek myth, and a 4th-century astrologer already linked Rasalhague, the constellation’s brightest star, with doctors and healers. Popular descriptions return to healing and transformation, curiosity and a love of learning, and the serpent’s hidden knowledge, and Pluto, its ruler in both Schmidt’s and Berg’s systems, adds its intensity.
None of this changes a Western or Vedic chart. A birth chart still places the Sun, the Moon and the planets in twelve signs, and a December birthday still has the Sun in Sagittarius there.
The Serpent Bearer in the sky
The name comes from the Greek Ophioukhos, “serpent holder”. The figure grips a huge snake, the constellation Serpens, whose head (Serpens Caput) lies on one side of him and its tail (Serpens Cauda) on the other: the only constellation in two pieces. With 948 square degrees, Ophiuchus is the 11th largest of the 88. It straddles the celestial equator, from 30° south to 14° north, so all of it rises everywhere between about 60° north and 75° south.
Its brightest star is Rasalhague (α Ophiuchi, magnitude 2.1), “the head of the serpent holder”, at the top of the figure next to the head of Hercules. Sabik (η), ζ Ophiuchi, Yed Prior (δ) and Cebalrai (β), “the shepherd’s dog”, follow. On July evenings, around 9 or 10 PM, the whole figure stands in the south as seen from mid-northern latitudes, above Scorpius and its red star Antares. In December it sits behind the Sun and cannot be seen at all.
Ophiuchus holds more than its stars:
- Barnard’s Star, 5.96 light-years away, is the closest star to us after the Alpha Centauri system, though at magnitude 9.5 it needs binoculars or a telescope.
- Kepler’s Supernova blazed up in the Serpent Bearer’s foot in October 1604. Johannes Kepler wrote a book about it, and it remains the last supernova in our galaxy seen with the naked eye.
- Seven Messier globular clusters: M9, M10, M12, M14, M19, M62 and M107, ancient, tightly packed balls of stars.
- The Rho Ophiuchi cloud, about 390 light-years away, the closest star-forming region to Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope celebrated its first year of science with a picture of it on July 12, 2023.
- Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft, lies in Ophiuchus as seen from Earth. On October 6, 2026 it was 172 times as far away as the Sun, near the constellation’s northern border with Hercules.
The Moon crosses Ophiuchus too, for about a day every month (13 times in 2026), and the planets pass through it on their way along the ecliptic. With a birth time, the 13 zodiac signs calculator shows the constellation of the Moon and every planet.
The myth of Asclepius
Asclepius was the son of Apollo, raised by the wise centaur Chiron, who taught him medicine. He became so skilled that he could bring the dead back to life. One story says he watched a snake revive another with a herb and used the same herb on a dead boy; another that the goddess Athena gave him the blood of the Gorgon Medusa, which could kill or restore. Hades, ruler of the underworld, feared the dead would stop arriving and complained to Zeus, who struck Asclepius down with a thunderbolt. Then, to honor his work, Zeus set him among the stars as the Serpent Bearer.
The snake he holds became a symbol of healing, because snakes shed their skin and seem to be born again. A single snake wound round a staff, the rod of Asclepius, still stands for medicine today. Other Greek tellings saw the figure as Apollo wrestling the serpent at Delphi, or Laocoön, the Trojan priest killed by sea serpents. Astrology’s Chiron, the wounded healer, takes its name from the same teacher.
The Ophiuchus symbol ⛎
The symbol goes back to Walter Berg, who gave his thirteenth sign this mark in 1995, and it caught on in Japan. Unicode added the character ⛎ (U+26CE, named OPHIUCHUS) in version 6.0, in 2010, among the first emoji, and phones show it as one. The astrology symbols page has the other signs' symbols. The mark this site draws for Ophiuchus follows the same symbol. Copy the character from the card at the top of the page.
Sources
Dates and the star chart are computed on this site: the Sun’s position comes from Astronomy Engine and the constellation borders from the IAU’s 1930 boundaries, the same as the 13 zodiac signs dates. Stars come from the HYG Database v4.1 (CC BY-SA 4.0); the chart itself is shared under the same license. Star names and facts: the IAU, Ian Ridpath’s Star Tales, SIMBAD and NASA; the history of the thirteenth sign: Time (September 26, 2016) and Wikipedia’s Ophiuchus (astrology); Voyager 1’s position: NASA JPL Horizons. The methodology page explains how the site tests its astronomy.