When You Just Can't Get the Birth Time
No Birth Time??  No Problem!! You can still get a beautiful and unique Your Wearable Cosmos™ birthchart necklace, even if you don't know what time of day you or someone else was born.  Read on to find out how this is possible, and how you can benefit. While the astrological Zodiac signs are all 30º wide, birth charts for specific times are usually also divided up into 12 unequally wide pie shaped segments, called Houses, numbered 1 (the Ascendant) through 12, which are superimposed or layered over the signs.  Houses define various life areas in which the planetary energies are most fully expressed, similar to theatrical stage sets.  The Houses have qualities that often resemble those of the signs, but they are not identical to the signs.   The Houses are the most personal part of the horoscope, as they are defined in relation to the specific time and place of birth of the given individual or event being studied, while the signs are defined solely by their relationship to the earth’s annual revolution around the sun.  Since the location of Houses depends entirely on having an accurate birth time, an untimed birth chart necklace doesn’t include them. In most modern House systems, the Ascendant is the beginning point of the 1st House (though a couple of systems place the Ascendant point somewhere in the middle of the 1st House).  Regardless of House system, the Ascendant is defined as the degree of the zodiac sign that is rising on the eastern horizon at the specific time and place of the birth event.  It is seen as a point that also defines the location of most of the other mathematical points used in astrological practice, such as the other House cusps, and it is thought to indicate something important about how the individual presents him or herself to the world at large.  The Ascendant degree changes every 4 minutes due to the Earth's rotation on its axis, so you can see that a small change in birth time has ramifications for the entire chart's interpretation. Don’t think that the lack of specified house cusps makes an untimed birthchart any less special, however.  There’s still a great deal of information available in knowing where in the signs your planets are located.  In just one day’s time, each of the planets will have moved slightly in the sky in the counterclockwise direction, i.e., up the degree numbers in the signs.  The Sun will have moved about 1º, the Moon will have moved about 12½º, Mercury will have moved almost 1½º, etc., creating other peoples’ birth chart configurations as they go.  As far as your necklace is concerned, these few minutes of motion in one 24 hour period won't matter for most celestial bodies. Untimed charts are generally calculated for 12 Noon as a best guess in order to find where everything was when the recipient was born or the event took place.  However, if you know that the birth took place "after sunrise" or "just after supper", that narrows the window of uncertainty from 24 hours down to maybe 3 or 4 hours, lending a little bit more precision.  It's still not enough to generate a specific ascendant degree or house cusps, but it makes the Moon's travel interval shorter.
					In an untimed chart, the Moon’s 11-15° travel through a given birth date from midnight to midnight is indicated by contrasting color degree beads.  In the photo, this region of the Moon's travel is indicated by the pale corn yellow beads (color #25), contrasting with the shimmery green (color #7) background beads of the rest of the necklace.  The elongated goldtone beads indicate the sign cusps, and the labradorite bead near the Moon represents Neptune at 15° of Leo (always counting from 0°), whose position is clearly known for this date because its travel rate is much slower than the Moon's is, as seen from Earth.  Asteroids Vesta (orange) and Lilith (black) can be seen at 8° and 13° in Virgo as well.
Using the example in the photo, a person with an untimed chart might see that their Moon was approximately conjunct their Neptune in Leo at their birth, but whether that conjunction was exact or very loose would remain unknown.  Still, knowing that one's Moon and Neptune are close indicates a very dreamy quality to the imagination and that idealism (Neptune qualities) and admired social standing (Leo values) are likely to be extremely important to one's feelings of security, trust, and self esteem (Moon issues).  The same might not be said if the Moon and Neptune were, say, 5 signs apart.  An untimed chart can yield lots of useful astrological information, despite not being so strictly precise as a timed one. Each untimed Your Wearable Cosmos™ birthchart necklace is unique, as each is custom hand-made-to-order, just like the more precisely timed ones.  No one else is likely to have made exactly the same choices in color or asteroids as you.  Even identical twins would have to actively conspire to achieve that level of sameness in specific details.