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Wiccan Wheel

Where does the year stand?
Samhain · Yule · Imbolc · Ostara · Beltane · Litha · Lughnasadh · Mabon

Every other Wheel of the Year app prints the same eight fixed dates. This one computes the instant the sun actually reaches each festival’s position, for your year, your location and your hemisphere, and shows you both.

The four solstices and equinoxes are solved from the real solar position. So are the four Gaelic fire festivals, which no calendar app computes at all. Imbolc is printed on 1 February and the sun reaches it on the 3rd or 4th. That gap is what the app is for.

Features

About the Astronomy

Solstices and equinoxes come from Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, chapter 27, and land within about a minute of the published values. The cross-quarter festivals have no published series, so the app solves directly for the sun’s apparent longitude at 315°, 45°, 135° and 225°, accurate to roughly a quarter hour. The app states that accuracy rather than hiding it.

Nothing is fetched. Every instant, from solar longitude to sunrise to moon phase, is computed on your device.

About the Tradition

The eight-fold wheel is a twentieth-century synthesis, assembled through the 1950s and 1960s by Gerald Gardner and Ross Nichols out of two older cycles. Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh are genuinely attested in medieval Irish literature. Litha, Ostara and Mabon were applied to the solar festivals by Aidan Kelly in 1974.

The app says so, on every page, with the sources. Attested folklore is marked as attested and the modern correspondence tables are marked as modern. Nothing here is invented antiquity.

Privacy

No ads. No tracking. No subscriptions. No in-app purchases. No network calls. Location is used only to work out your solar times and hemisphere, it never leaves the device, and you can decline it and type a coordinate instead.

Support

Need help with Wiccan Wheel? Whether you have a question, want to request a feature, or need to report a problem:

You can also browse existing issues to see if your question has already been answered.

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