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City comparison

Los Angeles vs Seattle

Rent, visas and flight costs rank these two the same way for everybody. The variable that is different for you is the one nobody has been able to check, until you can.

The two, side by side

Apart
1,545 km
13.9° of orb
Latitude gap
13.6°
34.05°N against 47.61°N
Solar time apart
0.3 h
4.1° of longitude

In short

Neither city is better. A place has no fixed character, it has a relationship with one particular birth chart, and Los Angeles and Seattle rank differently for people born days apart. What can be compared without knowing your birth moment is what each place is: how far north it sits, how much of the sky rises and sets there, and how many of the forty lines can reach it at all. That is what the rest of this page does.

What each place is

These figures come from the two cities’ positions and nothing else, so they are the same whoever is reading. Both are the starting point for a reading, never the reading itself.

Los Angeles, United States

Position
34.05°N, 118.2°W
subtropical latitudes, northern hemisphere
Time zone
America/Los_Angeles
Clocks run 7 minutes behind the local sun
Lines that can reach it
All forty
A body more than 55.9° from the celestial equator never rises or sets here
Longest day
14 hours 16 minutes
At the summer solstice

in the subtropics, where the year has a real shape to it but the light never becomes scarce

What Los Angeles asks of a person →

Seattle, United States

Position
47.61°N, 122.3°W
temperate latitudes, northern hemisphere
Time zone
America/Los_Angeles
Clocks run 9 minutes ahead of the local sun
Lines that can reach it
All forty
A body more than 42.4° from the celestial equator never rises or sets here
Longest day
15 hours 47 minutes
At the summer solstice

in the temperate middle latitudes, where the difference between a summer and a winter day is something you plan around

What Seattle asks of a person →

How the two differ, measurably

Three differences that hold for every reader, and one that does not hold for any two readers alike.

Distance, in the units a line is measured in

They are 1,545 km apart, which is 13.9° of great-circle distance. A planetary line counts as reaching a place within about two degrees, so two cities 13.9° apart are far enough apart that a line landing on one tells you nothing at all about the other. They have to be read separately.

How much of the sky rises and sets

Los Angeles sits at 34.05°N and Seattle at 47.61°N a gap of 13.6°. That is not a detail of climate; it decides which lines can exist. At Los Angeles a body further than 55.9° from the celestial equator never rises or sets, and at Seattle the limit is 42.4°. Both are low enough that all ten bodies clear it, so the full set of forty lines is drawable at each.

What the clock is doing to the sun

4.1° of longitude separates them, about 0.3 hours of solar time. Against their own clocks, midday in Los Angeles arrives 7 minutes before the sun is actually overhead, and in Seattle, 9 minutes after. This has no bearing on a reading, your lines come from where you were born, not where you are standing, but it is exactly the kind of difference that makes a birth time recorded in the wrong zone move every line on a map.

And the one that is yours alone

Everything above is true for everybody. Which of these two places asks more of you, gives more back, or is simply quiet ground is a function of one arrangement of the sky that has never repeated, the one over you at birth. Most of the world is quiet ground for most charts, and if that is the answer here we say so rather than reaching for the nearest thing.

Questions

Questions people ask

Where the honest answer is unhelpful to us, it is still the one printed.

  1. Is Los Angeles or Seattle the better city?

    Neither, in general, and any page that answers that question without knowing when you were born is describing something that does not exist. A city has no fixed character; it has a relationship with one particular birth chart. Los Angeles may sit almost exactly on a line of yours while Seattle is nowhere near anything, or the reverse, or, most commonly, both may be quiet ground for you. The reading at the top of this site works that out in about a minute, free, on your own device.

  2. How far apart are Los Angeles and Seattle?

    1,545 km, great-circle. In the units this product measures proximity in that is 13.9° of orb, which matters because a planetary line is only considered to reach a place within about 2°. Two cities 13.9° apart are far enough apart that a line reaching one says nothing about the other.

  3. Can all forty lines reach both cities?

    Yes. Every one of the ten bodies rises and sets at both latitudes, so all forty lines are drawable at Los Angeles and at Seattle.

  4. Does the time difference between them matter for a reading?

    Not for the reading itself, the lines come from where you were BORN, not from where you are standing. It matters for the birth moment: Los Angeles and Seattle are 4.1° of longitude apart, about 0.3 hours of solar time, so if you were born in one and entered the other's time zone by mistake, every line on your map would move by roughly 454 kilometres.

Your own map

Read Los Angeles and Seattle against your own chart

Both cities, your birth moment, and the honest answer, including “neither of these is near anything of yours”, which is the most common one.

Draw my 40 lines

No card. No account needed to see your map.

Keep reading

Other comparisons

Each of these pairs one of the two cities above with somewhere else worth weighing it against.