Owen McGinley
Here it is…the beautiful website. The design is pretty simple - a box at the top telling you if Uranus is in retrograde, and then details on the 8 other planets (yes, Pluto IS a planet) and their retrograde status. Also shown is the switch date, for

Is Uranus In Retrograde

Astrology. Whether we like it or not, lots of people around the world turn to the movement of the planets and their zodiac signs as a way to guide them through life.

People on the internet genuinely write long-winded articles that claim that a list of these things will happen when…a planet is in apparent retrograde motion in the sky? Personally I don’t believe in astrology but hey, whatever floats your boat I suppose.

There’s a website that exists called “Is Mercury in Retrograde?”, since Mercury tends to get the brunt of most jokes about being/not being in retrograde. But I saw that nobody made a dedicated website to tell you if the 7th planet from the sun, Uranus, was doing that retrograde motion. Such a shame that Uranus has the most unfortunate name of the planets.

And that’s where the intrusive thought won.

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Languages: Python, JavaScript, CSS

Frameworks: Flask, Skyfield, React, Material UI

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You can see if Uranus is in retrograde by visiting https://isuranusinretrograde.com.

Here it is…the beautiful website. The design is pretty simple - a box at the top telling you if Uranus is in retrograde, and then details on the 8 other planets (yes, Pluto IS a planet) and their retrograde status. Also shown is the switch date, for

Here it is…the beautiful website. The design is pretty simple - a box at the top telling you if Uranus is in retrograde, and then details on the 8 other planets (yes, Pluto IS a planet) and their retrograde status. Also shown is the switch date, for when a planet will enter/exit retrograde. The background image is also Uranus (imaged by Voyager 2 in 1984).

Since Uranus has quite the unfortunate pronunciation, I ensured that all jokes on the website crack into this.

The top box also has jokes depending on if Uranus is in retrograde or not. Generally, Uranus being in retrograde = you can be delusional, but not in retrograde = sad. There’s about ten of them for each retrograde status, and one is randomly picked when you load the site.

If Uranus is about to go into or out of retrograde, a 24-hour countdown appears on the website so you can count down exactly to when the switchover will happen. This site originally had a going into retrograde countdown but not the other way around

If Uranus is about to go into or out of retrograde, a 24-hour countdown appears on the website so you can count down exactly to when the switchover will happen.

This site originally had a going into retrograde countdown but not the other way around. I hastily coded the going out of retrograde countdown a couple days before Uranus exited retrograde (at least, for the first time when this site was running).

Keeping note of that “funny joke” you see in the screenshot, some not so fortunate life events occurred when Uranus was about to exit retrograde. Now I believe in the astrology of Uranus and will be keeping tabs on this website more often.

The last part of the website is my excuse to write up what I learned while making this project. I actually had to dabble my toes in the land of planetary physics (not my specialty) and break out that Universe Sandbox knowledge. Thankfully, I landed

The last part of the website is my excuse to write up what I learned while making this project.

I actually had to dabble my toes in the land of planetary physics (not my specialty) and break out that Universe Sandbox knowledge. Thankfully, I landed on the Skyfield python library, which is an awesome library that allows you to do high-precision calculations on planetary movement.

One of Skyfield’s features is that you can observe a planet from Earth at any given time (within the limits of the ephemeris you’re using…not getting into that). You can observe its apparent motion in the celestial coordinate system, which was what I was looking for. The script I wrote to collect retrograde data does three passes to find switchover times where the position of a planet goes “backwards” in the sky (relative to the celestial coordinate system).

The first pass is a granular day-by-day one, before going more in-depth to find the exact switchover date to the second. It then does it for every planet in the Solar System. The script takes about 3 minutes to run, so I have it run every day at midnight to get the timings and then display a cached result on the website. This required a bit of ingenius engineering to display the right thing on the site in those cases where a planet is/isn’t in retrograde but the next switchover time hadn’t been calculated yet.

This also means that I think this is the only website on the internet that shows you the precise time, down to the second, when a planet will enter/leave retrograde. Everywhere else I looked only gives you day-level precision (the Is Mercury In Retrograde website has minute-level precision).

Anyway, that’s Is Uranus In Retrograde. It’s a little project inspired by an intrusive thought on a walk and it won.