Mercury is not going backwards. We just see it that way.

Planets travel one way around their orbits. So does Mercury. But because Earth and Mercury circle the Sun at different speeds, we overtake Mercury three or four times a year — the same way a slower car on the motorway seems to drift backwards for a moment as you pass it. What we see in the sky is exactly that: apparent backward motion produced by a difference in relative speed.

Astronomy calls this apparent retrograde motion, and it is entirely computable. The instant a planet's geocentric longitude stops increasing and begins to decrease is the instant it turns retrograde. That moment is called the station. When the reverse happens, the planet turns direct again.

The distinction may sound pedantic, but it decides what you are entitled to claim. Nothing in the sky physically reverses. What changes is our vantage point. Whether astrological tradition should attach meaning to that appearance is a separate question — and knowing where the meaning comes from is more useful than believing it blindly.

The app does not read retrograde dates off a list. It computes each planet's longitude from ephemeris data and finds the day that longitude starts decreasing — the station — for itself. That means the calendar is not content someone has to update each January; whatever the sky is doing is what you get.

Three planets are watched, deliberately: Mercury, Venus and Mars. The outer planets, Jupiter through Pluto, spend months of every year retrograde, and alerting you to those would be noise rather than news. If you turn retrograde notifications on, you hear about the days something actually changes.

Retrogrades are marked in your natal chart too. If a planet was moving backwards at the moment you were born, it appears with a ℞ beside it on the chart screen. That is computed data rather than interpretation — and the next section is about what it is generally taken to mean.

Most people know retrograde as those three-week windows on the calendar, but the genuinely useful half of the topic is natal. Roughly a fifth of the population is born with Mercury retrograde, and it is not a defect.

Tradition reads a retrograde natal planet as one that works inwards. Retrograde Mercury is described as a mind that wants to finish thinking before it speaks: the person who finds the perfect sentence an hour later, who cannot learn something until they have rebuilt it in their own words. Retrograde Venus is read as affection that grows through time and privacy rather than display. Retrograde Mars, as drive and anger processed internally before anything shows on the outside.

These are descriptions, not diagnoses. A symbol in your chart does not explain you; it hands you a vocabulary, and you decide whether that vocabulary earns its place. Baby Astro shows the retrograde marker and reports how the tradition reads it. It does not issue a verdict about who you are.

The verbs tradition attaches to retrograde all come from one family: review, revise, revisit, resolve, repair. The app's own retrograde checklist reflects it — stay calm, slow your conversations, back up and double-check, finish old business. None of that is esoteric. All of it is ordinary good advice.

And here is where we have to be straight with you: there is no measured evidence that retrogrades void contracts, break devices or end relationships. When things go wrong during a retrograde we notice; when they go fine, we do not count it. What astrology offers here is a suggested rhythm, not a cause — and taking it that way is the most durable way to find it useful.

So Baby Astro presents a retrograde as a marker rather than a warning. It does not tell you to avoid signing anything. It tells you the day Mercury stations, explains what the tradition reserves the period for, and leaves the decision with you. If you genuinely want timing for an upcoming signature, the right tool is not the retrograde calendar — it is electional timing and your Eşref Saati window.