Minor Aspects Calculator — Semisextile, Semisquare, Quintile, Quindecile, Sesquiquadrate, Biquintile

What minor aspects are

A minor aspect is any angle between two bodies that falls outside the five Ptolemaic aspects — conjunction, sextile, square, trine, opposition — but still corresponds to a clean division of the circle: halves of halves (45°, 135°), halves of sextiles (30°, 15°), or fifths (72°, 144°).

The tradition split them into two families. The quadranal ones — semisextile, semisquare, sesquiquadrate — were considered 'aversions': mild, persistent friction rather than open conflict. The quintile family — quintile, biquintile, and by extension the quindecile — became the angles of creative intelligence: talent expressed through making and knowing.

Nobody claims minors operate at a major aspect's volume. They describe background textures and specific gifts, and they are worth reading precisely because tight orbs make them defensible: a quindecile at 0.13° is a fact about your chart, not a maybe.

How we detect them

Positions come from sub-arcsecond astronomy (VSOP87/ELP via astronomy-engine). Every pair of placements is measured and classified against six fixed bands: quindecile 15° ± 1.5°, semisextile 30° ± 2°, semisquare 45° ± 2°, quintile 72° ± 2°, sesquiquadrate 135° ± 2°, biquintile 144° ± 2°.

Band hygiene is verified rather than assumed. The minor bands sit entirely clear of the five Ptolemaic orbs: nothing at 70°–74° is also a square's or sextile's territory, nothing at 133°–137° is a trine's, nothing at 142°–146° is a quincunx's. A minor hit can never steal a major classification, and adding the minor pass leaves every existing major-aspect finding unchanged — the probe asserts exactly that.

Orbs are deliberately narrow. Minor aspects were never reputed to act at 6°; loose settings turn the table into noise. Our bands follow the strict end of modern published practice, and every row is sorted tightest-first so the strongest contacts lead.

What the report returns

One table plus a legend, every number verified:

• Every minor aspect in your chart, tightest orb first.
• Each pair with exact degrees-in-sign and signs, the measured angle, and the orb.
• Whether the aspect is applying or separating, from the bodies' daily motions.
• The six tested bands with their glyphs — ⚺ ⚻ ∠ ⬠ ⚼ ⬡ — and a plain-language meaning for each.
• A none statement when nothing closes, which for the tightest minors is a normal, honest result.

A worked example: eleven rows, 1 January 2000

Our reference chart — London, 1 January 2000, 17:30 UT — produces eleven minor aspects under these bands, and our automated probe asserts the table. The headline is intimacy itself: Jupiter at 25.26° Aries quindecile Saturn at 10.39° Taurus, an orb of just 0.13° — the tightest minor contact in the chart.

Second comes the creative angle: Mars at 28.14° Aquarius quintile that same Saturn, 0.25° away from exact. Saturn is doing double duty here — drawn into close, odd-angle links with both expansion and drive.

Third, the oldest aversion on the list: Mercury at 2.25° Capricorn semisextile Venus at 1.84° Sagittarius, 0.40° off. The remaining eight rows run from a Venus×Jupiter biquintile at 0.58° down to a Jupiter×Uranus quintile at 1.55° — every one inside our published bands, none invented.

What the example shows is the point of tight orbs: three of the eleven rows sit inside half a degree. Those are contacts you can build a reading on, not statistical dust.

How to read each family

Read the quindecile (15°) as almost-conjunction: the two bodies are close enough to feel each other constantly but wrong enough never to blend. In synastry it has long been read as attraction; natally, as a fixated pair of functions.

Read the semisextile (30°) as adjacent-sign friction — the two planets speak neighbouring dialects and keep tripping over the difference. It asks for acknowledgement, nothing dramatic. The semisquare (45°) and sesquiquadrate (135°) are half-square and square-and-a-half: small recurring irritants, and the frustrated square — friction expressed sideways, hard to look at directly.

Read the quintile (72°) and biquintile (144°) as the creativity circuit: skill, intelligence, the pleasure of making something known. The quintile is the flash; the biquintile is the worked-over version — taste and synthesis. In the 2000 chart, Saturn quintiled by Mars and quindeciled by Jupiter is a drive-and-structure story the tradition would call gifted but demanding.

One caution travels with all six: minors are supporting actors. Use them to confirm and colour a major-aspect story, not to replace one.

What this tool does not claim

The six bands are our published setting, not law. Authorities disagree — some allow 1° on the quindecile and 3° on the quintile family, others skip the quadranal angles entirely. Different orbs will produce different tables elsewhere; ours is stated exactly so you can re-derive or challenge it.

The symbolic vocabulary is tradition and modern convention, not evidence. The 'aversion' label is genuinely old — Valens and Lilly discuss the quadranal angles — but the quintile family's creativity reading is a twentieth-century harmonic-astrology inheritance. We present both as lenses with stated lineages, not discoveries.

Minor aspects do not override majors, and quantity is not significance: a chart with thirty loose minors is not 'more aspected' than one with three tight ones. This pass reports what closes under strict bands and leaves the ranking of importance to you. All computation runs locally; your birth data never leaves your browser.

Our method in one line

Positions from sub-arcsecond astronomy (VSOP87/ELP via astronomy-engine), read through Porphyry quadrant houses (whole-sign available on every chart). The six bands and their non-collision with the Ptolemaic orbs are asserted by our automated probe (Batch F), as is the full eleven-row canonical table above. Reviewed by Dr. Amara Osei, Astronomy Reviewer.