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City comparison

San Francisco vs Miami

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
4,170 km
37.5° of orb
Latitude gap
12.0°
37.77°N against 25.76°N
Solar time apart
2.8 h
42.2° of longitude

In short

Neither city is better. A place has no fixed character, it has a relationship with one particular birth chart, and San Francisco and Miami 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.

San Francisco, United States

Position
37.77°N, 122.4°W
temperate latitudes, northern hemisphere
Time zone
America/Los_Angeles
Clocks run 10 minutes ahead of the local sun
Lines that can reach it
All forty
A body more than 52.2° from the celestial equator never rises or sets here
Longest day
14 hours 37 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 San Francisco asks of a person →

Miami, United States

Position
25.76°N, 80.2°W
subtropical latitudes, northern hemisphere
Time zone
America/New_York
Clocks run 21 minutes ahead of the local sun
Lines that can reach it
All forty
A body more than 64.2° from the celestial equator never rises or sets here
Longest day
13 hours 37 minutes
At the summer solstice

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

What Miami 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 4,170 km apart, which is 37.5° of great-circle distance. A planetary line counts as reaching a place within about two degrees, so two cities 37.5° 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

San Francisco sits at 37.77°N and Miami at 25.76°N a gap of 12.0°. That is not a detail of climate; it decides which lines can exist. At San Francisco a body further than 52.2° from the celestial equator never rises or sets, and at Miami the limit is 64.2°. 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

42.2° of longitude separates them, about 2.8 hours of solar time. Against their own clocks, midday in San Francisco arrives 10 minutes after the sun is actually overhead, and in Miami, 21 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 San Francisco or Miami 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. San Francisco may sit almost exactly on a line of yours while Miami 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 San Francisco and Miami?

    4,170 km, great-circle. In the units this product measures proximity in that is 37.5° of orb, which matters because a planetary line is only considered to reach a place within about 2°. Two cities 37.5° 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 San Francisco and at Miami.

  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: San Francisco and Miami are 42.2° of longitude apart, about 2.8 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 4687 kilometres.

Your own map

Read San Francisco and Miami 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.