Stations
What the time of a planet’s station means
A station is the instant a planet’s motion against the stars reverses. See why the time is exact yet the planet barely moves for days around it.
01 · Zoom in on the turn
A station is one instant inside days of near stillness.
A station is the moment a planet’s longitude stops increasing and starts decreasing, or the reverse. On a calendar it looks sudden. Zoom in on Mercury’s station of 26 February 2026 and the turn becomes a long, flat crest.
The station time is precise, but the planet hardly moves for a day or more either side of it. That is why the times around stations are often described in days rather than minutes.
02 · Measured against what
The zodiac you measure in moves the moment slightly.
The tropical and sidereal zodiacs drift apart by about 50″ a year, a tiny rate. Near a station, when the planet’s own motion is also tiny, that difference decides when the speed reaches zero, and slow planets feel it most.
The instant of turning
A planet’s station is the moment its motion along the ecliptic, seen from Earth, changes direction. At a retrograde station its longitude stops increasing and begins to decrease; at a direct station the reverse. In between, the planet appears to move backwards, as why planets appear to move backwards explains.
The listed time is the instant the planet’s speed in longitude is exactly zero. It is calculated, not observed: the planet does not visibly stop at that moment.
Days of near stillness
Speed changes gradually, so it is close to zero for a long time on either side of the station. Mercury’s retrograde station of 26 February 2026 came at 12:17 IST, at 328°21′ in the sidereal zodiac. Measured with the site’s ephemeris:
| Distance from the turning point | Time spent within it |
|---|---|
| Within 1′ (one sixtieth of a degree) | About 22 hours |
| Within 0.1° | About 2¼ days |
| Within 1° | About 7 days |
For slower planets the stillness lasts longer. Jupiter, at its station of 13 December 2026, stays within 0.1° of the turning point for about two weeks.
That is why a station’s minute-precise time and a description such as “Mercury is stationary this week” can both be right. One gives the turning instant; the other describes the days when the planet is hardly moving.
What the time depends on
Speed is measured in a particular zodiac, and the two common zodiacs drift apart by about 50″ a year. That rate is tiny, but near a station the planet’s own speed is tiny too, so the choice moves the instant at which the speed reaches zero. For the 2026 stations, the sidereal and tropical times differed by about a minute for Mercury, three minutes for Venus, 26 minutes for Jupiter and an hour for Saturn. panchang.now measures motion in the sidereal zodiac it uses for positions.
A station happens at one instant for the whole world, like a sign ingress. Each city shows it in local time.
In a Kundli
A birth chart marks a planet that is moving backwards with an R. A planet born very close to a station is moving backwards or forwards so slowly that the marking depends on minutes, and different conventions can disagree about it. The retrograde planets guide explains how the marking is read.
See upcoming stations on the planetary events page, or explore another topic in Learn.