Taurus

Taurus at a glance

Symbol

The Bull

Sun in Taurus

About 20 April to 20 May (exact times vary by year)

Element

Earth

Modality

Fixed

Ruled by

Venus

Exaltation

The Moon

Detriment

Mars

Fall

None in traditional astrology

Natural house

The 2nd house

Opposite sign

Scorpio

Which stars make up Taurus?

Taurus holds two of the most famous star clusters in the sky. The Pleiades ride on the bull’s shoulder, a tight knot of blue stars many people can count to six or seven by eye, and the Hyades form the V of its face.

Aldebaran, the bull’s red eye, looks like part of the Hyades but isn’t. It sits about 65 light years away, less than half the distance of the cluster behind it. Its Arabic name means “the follower”, because it rises just after the Pleiades, as if chasing them across the sky.

Where does Taurus come from?

Taurus may be the oldest figure in the zodiac. In Babylonian star lists the constellation is GU4.AN.NA, the Bull of Heaven, the same name as the beast the goddess Ishtar sends against Gilgamesh in the oldest epic we know. Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu kill it, and Enkidu tears off its thigh and throws it at the goddess.

For more than two thousand years, until about 1865 BCE by modern boundaries, the spring equinox sat among these stars, so the bull marked the start of the farming year across the ancient Near East. Greek myth gave it a gentler story, with Zeus disguised as a white bull, carrying the princess Europa across the sea to Crete. The continent took her name.

In 1054, Chinese astronomers recorded a “guest star” near the bull’s southern horn, bright enough to see in daylight for 23 days. It was a supernova. Its wreckage is the Crab Nebula, still expanding today, and one of the most studied objects in astronomy.

How does Taurus 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 Taurus rising?

The share of each day with Taurus on the Ascendant, and how long it takes to rise, at four latitudes. In London it is the 9th most common of the 12 rising signs.

Place	Share of the day	Time to rise
Equator	8.3%	119 min
Madrid	6%	86 min
London	4.8%	69 min
Reykjavík	1.5%	22 min

Find your rising sign

The rarest rising sign, city by city

How common is Taurus?

In US birth records from 1994 to 2014, 8.32% of babies were born under Taurus, about 83 in every 1,000. That makes Taurus number 6 of 12, where 1 is the most common.

See all 12 signs ranked

When is the Moon next in Taurus?

The Moon is next in Taurus from Sun 22 Nov 10:09 UTC until Tue 24 Nov 11:09 UTC.

The next new moon in Taurus is on Thursday 6 May 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.