Leo

Leo at a glance

Symbol

The Lion

Sun in Leo

About 23 July to 22 August (exact times vary by year)

Element

Fire

Modality

Fixed

Ruled by

The Sun

Exaltation

None in traditional astrology

Detriment

Saturn

Fall

None in traditional astrology

Natural house

The 5th house

Opposite sign

Aquarius

Which stars make up Leo?

Leo is one of the few constellations that looks like what it’s named for. A backwards question mark of stars, the Sickle, forms the lion’s head and mane, and a triangle behind it makes the haunches and tail.

At the bottom of the Sickle sits Regulus, the lion’s heart. It sits almost exactly on the Sun’s path, so the Moon and planets pass close by it regularly, and sometimes in front of it.

Where does Leo come from?

The Babylonians knew this figure as UR.GU.LA, the Great Lion, and the lion has stayed a lion ever since. Its brightest star had a royal name in almost every language. Ptolemy called it Basiliskos, “little king”, and Copernicus translated that into the Latin Regulus.

Greek myth made it the Nemean Lion, whose hide no weapon could pierce. Heracles strangled it with his bare hands as the first of his twelve labours and wore its skin as armour for the rest of his life.

Every November, Earth passes through a stream of dust left by a comet, and meteors seem to fly out of the lion’s mane. In 1833 that shower, the Leonids, became a storm of tens of thousands of meteors an hour across North America. The panic and wonder it caused helped turn meteors into a science.

How does Leo line up with the real sky?

There are three different versions of every sign. The Earth’s axis wobbles like a slowing spinning top, a full circle about every 25,800 years, and that drags the spring equinox west against the stars by about one degree every 72 years.

Western astrology stays locked to the seasons, Vedic astrology follows the stars, and the two are now 24.2° apart. Hali uses the tropical zodiac because it follows the seasons the signs were named for.

How often is Leo rising?

The share of each day with Leo on the Ascendant, and how long it takes to rise, at four latitudes. In London it is the most common rising sign of all.

Place	Share of the day	Time to rise
Equator	8.3%	119 min
Madrid	10.6%	152 min
London	11.8%	170 min
Reykjavík	15%	217 min

Find your rising sign

The rarest rising sign, city by city

How common is Leo?

In US birth records from 1994 to 2014, 8.96% of babies were born under Leo, about 90 in every 1,000. That makes Leo number 1 of 12, where 1 is the most common.

See all 12 signs ranked

When is the Moon next in Leo?

The Moon is in Leo now, until Tue 3 Nov 08:27 UTC.

The next full moon in Leo is the Wolf Moon, on Friday 22 January 2027.

Where is the Moon today?

Sources and methods

Tropical and sidereal (Lahiri) dates for 2026 computed by Hali; constellation dates approximate, from IAU boundaries. Babylonian names follow the MUL.APIN star compendium.

Dignities follow Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I. Our data is free to use under CC BY 4.0.