A planet is retrograde, or vakri, when it appears from Earth to move backwards through the zodiac. This tracker shows which planets are retrograde right now and lists every Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn retrograde window for the year with exact dates. It needs no birth details: retrograde motion is the same event for everyone.
Computed for · refreshed hourly
Currently retrograde
Retrograde motion is an optical effect. Earth and the other planets orbit at different speeds, and when Earth overtakes an outer planet, or an inner planet overtakes Earth, the other body appears to loop backwards against the stars for a while before resuming forward motion. Nothing about the planet's own orbit reverses.
Technically it is the sign of the planet's longitude speed, which is what this tracker tests day by day. Because the speed changes sign at the same instant in any reference frame, retrograde status is frame-independent: no ayanamsha is involved, and a sidereal and a tropical calculation agree on the dates to the second.
Five of the nine grahas actually change direction: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The Sun and the Moon never do, because their apparent motion is not produced by an overtaking. Rahu and Ketu are the lunar nodes and are always retrograde in mean motion, so they are not tracked here either.
The frequencies differ sharply. Mercury turns retrograde about three to four times a year for roughly three weeks each time, which is why it dominates the conversation. Venus retrogrades about every nineteen months, Mars about every twenty-six, and Jupiter and Saturn once each year for periods of about four and about four and a half months respectively.
It scans the year day by day, computing each planet's longitude speed to sub-arcsecond precision and recording the days on which the sign of that speed flips. Each period is reported with a start and an end, and a period already under way on 1 January is flagged as beginning before the year rather than being cut off at the boundary.
The page states the current status at the top, so the question that brings most people here - whether Mercury is retrograde today - is answered in the first line. Everything else on the page is the year's schedule, which is useful for planning around the windows rather than checking them after the fact.
For educational purposes. Astrological interpretations are traditional and not a substitute for professional advice.