Everything on this page is a real astronomical event with a computable date. Retrogrades, ingresses, eclipses and the solstices and equinoxes all happen at determinate moments and can be checked against any ephemeris.
That is the whole of the factual layer. What the tradition reads into these events is convention, and the two are kept visibly separate here rather than presented in one register.
The dates are the part you can verify. The meanings are the part you can decide about.
No planet reverses. A retrograde is what it looks like when two objects moving at different speeds pass each other — the standard analogy is overtaking a slower car, which appears to drift backwards against the landscape.
Mercury does this three or four times a year, which is why it dominates the conversation. The outer planets are retrograde for a substantial fraction of every year, which is why nobody organises anything around Neptune.
The traditional reading is inward expression: the planet's function turned back on itself, review rather than initiation. That is a claim about emphasis, not about your devices.
An ingress is a planet entering a new sign. For the Sun that happens every month and marks the familiar boundaries; for Saturn or Pluto it is a rarer event and gets read as a shift in a long background condition.
The solstices and equinoxes are the four cardinal ingresses of the Sun, and they are the anchor the entire tropical zodiac is measured from. Zero degrees Aries is the March equinox by definition.
Eclipses occur when a new or full moon happens close enough to the plane of the Earth's orbit for the shadows to align, which is why they arrive in a predictable rhythm rather than every month.
The failure mode with sky-watching is deferral: postponing a decision until a retrograde ends, or waiting for a difficult transit to pass before acting.
The tradition does not ask for that. The periods involved are long, they overlap constantly, and a year spent waiting for clear conditions is simply a year spent waiting.
Used as a prompt to review something, a retrograde costs nothing and is roughly what the tradition suggests. Used as a reason not to sign a contract, it is a modern invention wearing an old name.
A transit means considerably more when measured against your birth positions than in the abstract. Saturn reaching the degree of your natal Sun is a specific event; Saturn being in Pisces is weather.
That is what makes the birth chart the useful companion to this page — without natal positions there is nothing for the current sky to form an angle to.
The most widely reported of these is the Saturn return around twenty-nine, which is also the transit most easily explained by the ordinary structure of a life at that age. Both accounts are worth holding at once.
