Pisces

Pisces at a glance

Symbol

The Fish

Sun in Pisces

About 19 February to 20 March (exact times vary by year)

Element

Water

Modality

Mutable

Ruled by

Jupiter in traditional astrology, Neptune in modern astrology

Exaltation

Venus

Detriment

Mercury

Fall

Mercury

Natural house

The 12th house

Opposite sign

Virgo

Which stars make up Pisces?

Pisces is large and faint, two fish joined by long cords of stars that meet in a knot. One fish is easy to spot as the Circlet, a small ring of stars just south of the great square of Pegasus.

The knot is the star Alrescha, from the Arabic for “the cord”. Somewhere along the cords lies the most important point in astronomy’s map of the sky, the spring equinox itself.

Where does Pisces come from?

The Babylonians saw two separate creatures here, a swallow and the goddess Anunitum, joined by a cord, and called the group the Tails. The Greeks turned both into fish, and kept the cord.

In their story, the goddess Aphrodite and her son Eros were by the river Euphrates when the monster Typhon appeared. They leapt into the water and became fish, and tied themselves together with a cord so the current could never separate them.

Pisces now holds the spring equinox, which drifted in from Aries in 68 BCE by modern boundaries. That’s why astronomers measure the sky from a point among these stars, and why the equinox will cross into Aquarius around 2600.

How does Pisces 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 Pisces rising?

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

Place	Share of the day	Time to rise
Equator	7.7%	112 min
Madrid	5%	72 min
London	3.6%	53 min
Reykjavík	0.9%	13 min

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How common is Pisces?

In US birth records from 1994 to 2014, 8.06% of babies were born under Pisces, about 81 in every 1,000. That makes Pisces number 9 of 12, where 1 is the most common.

See all 12 signs ranked

When is the Moon next in Pisces?

The Moon is next in Pisces from Tue 17 Nov 21:19 UTC until Fri 20 Nov 05:52 UTC.

The next new moon in Pisces is on Monday 8 March 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.