Local Space Astrology: The Direction Lines From Your Birthplace

Astrocartography asks where on Earth each planet was rising, setting, culminating or at its lowest point at the moment you were born, and draws those places as lines across the globe. Local Space asks something else entirely: standing here, in which compass direction does each planet lie?

The answer is a set of direction lines — azimuths — fanning out from a center point like spokes. Your Jupiter might run east-northeast; your Moon, southwest. Travel or orient yourself along a planet's direction, the technique holds, and you strengthen that planet's themes in your life. It is the most intuitive of the locational methods, because it speaks the everyday language of direction: this way, that way, toward, away.

This is the heart of the difference. Astrocartography lines are global and fixed — a planet's Midheaven line falls on the same meridian no matter who is looking at it. Local Space lines are relative to a center: they radiate from wherever you place the chart. Cast Local Space from your birthplace and the lines fan out from there; cast it from the city you live in now and they fan out from your front door.

Each planet has a position in the local sky at your birth, described by two numbers: its altitude (how high) and its azimuth (its compass bearing). Local Space keeps the azimuth and extends it outward as a great circle — the straightest possible path across the curved Earth — so the line begins at your location and sweeps around the globe along that bearing. On a flat map these great circles appear as graceful curves, but on the ground each one starts as a single, definite compass heading.

Pick the planet whose quality you want more of, and look at the direction it points from where you are. A few of the bearings people work with:

Jupiter	Expansion, opportunity, travel, teaching. A classic "good fortune" direction to move or journey toward.
Venus	Love, beauty, pleasure, social ease. Often used for relationship and creative direction.
Sun	Vitality, recognition, becoming more yourself and more visible.
Saturn	Discipline, structure, solitude and serious work — useful when you want to build, less so when you want lightness.
Mars	Drive, courage, physical energy and the appetite for a fight; sharp and activating.

At the largest scale, you read Local Space as travel and relocation guidance: a trip taken in your Venus direction tends to feel different from one in your Saturn direction. At the smallest scale, you read it inside a home — placing your desk, bed or studio toward a benefic direction. Both are legitimate uses of the same lines.

They are companions, not rivals. Astrocartography gives you the fixed, global picture — the planetary lines that cross specific cities. Local Space gives you the personal, directional picture from wherever you currently stand. Many practitioners check both: the astrocartography map to find resonant places, and Local Space to understand the direction those places lie and how the journey toward them is coloured.

Local Space astrology was developed by Michael Erlewine in the 1970s, through his work at Matrix Software, one of the pioneering astrology software houses. It draws on the horizon coordinate system — the same altitude-and-azimuth framework astronomers use to point a telescope — and it rhymes with older directional and geomantic traditions that treated compass orientation as meaningful. But the modern locational method, mapped and named, is Erlewine's contribution.