Constellation
Aries
Aries is a small, dim zodiac constellation, the ram with the golden fleece, whose brightest stars form a short bent line. The Sun passes in front of it from about 18 April to 13 May.
The myth
Aries is the ram with the golden fleece. In the Greek story it was sent to carry two children to safety across the sea before they could be sacrificed. The glittering fleece it left behind became the treasure that Jason and his Argonauts sailed to the ends of the known world to find.
How to find it
Aries is faint and easy to walk past. Look in the gap between the bright V of Taurus and the big square of Pegasus for a short, slightly crooked line of a few stars. The brightest, Hamal, is the ram’s head. The best time to look is on autumn and early winter evenings in the northern hemisphere. In April and May, the Sun is in front of it and the stars are lost in daylight.
When the Sun is there
By the official star boundaries, Hali’s calculations put the Sun in front of Aries from about 18 April to 13 May in 2026, an average of 25.5 days a year. That is well after the Aries sign season, which in 2026 ran from 20 March to 20 April. Someone born with the Sun in the sign Aries almost always had it in front of the stars of Pisces. Hali’s figures give 29 of the sign’s 30.5 days to Pisces and only about a day and a half to Aries itself.
Why the first sign is named after it
The tropical zodiac starts at the March equinox, the moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator heading north. When Greek astronomers fixed the names, that point lay among the stars of Aries, so the first sign took the ram’s name and the equinox became the first point of Aries. Earth’s slow wobble, precession, has moved the equinox west along the stars by about a degree every 71 years, and it now lies in Pisces.
A star you can find in your chart
Hamal, the ram’s head, sits at 8 degrees of the sign Taurus in 2026 by Hali’s star positions, and the Sun passes it around 28 April each year. Astrologers who use fixed stars look for planets or angles within a degree or so of it.
Sign and constellation
Your Aries sign is a season-based slice of the zodiac, not this star pattern, and the two drifted apart long ago. See why your star sign is not a constellation. The Aries sign guide covers the sign, the Aries dates page lists when it starts each year, and the real sky tool shows which constellation was really behind your Sun.
Questions
Why is the spring equinox called the first point of Aries?
Because about two thousand years ago, when the name stuck, the Sun stood in front of the stars of Aries at the March equinox. Precession has since moved that point into Pisces, but astronomers and astrologers kept the old name.
Sources: Standard references and Greek myth. Hali Sun in constellation times, 1950 to 2029, official IAU boundaries.