To read an almanac easily you should learn the following signs:
| ☉ | The Sun | ☿ | Mercury |
| ○ | Full Moon | ♀ | Venus |
| ☾ | Last Quarter | ♁ | The Earth |
| ● | New Moon | ♂ | Mars |
| ☽ | First Quarter | ||
| ♃ | Jupiter | ☌ | Conjunction |
| ♄ | Saturn | ☍ | Opposition |
| ♅ | Uranus | ||
| ♆ | Neptune | ||
Conjunction.—When this sign is used it means that two planets, or the Sun and a planet, or the Moon and a planet, are on the same side of the Earth.
Opposition.—When this sign is used it means that two planets, or the Sun and a planet, or the Moon and a planet, are on opposite sides of the Earth.
To see how these signs work out suppose you look up the month of January, 1915, in an almanac.
The first line, besides showing that it is the first day of the year, the first day of the month and that it is Friday, also shows that the ○ (Moon) is full. It further gives the time the ☉ (Sun) rises and sets, the length of the days in hours and minutes, the ○ (Moon’s) age in days, and when it rises and sets.
Then on the same line the following signs are given: ♂ ☿ ☌ and this means that a conjunction of Mercury and Mars will take place on this date; that is, that they will be nearer to each other from our line of sight than at any other time for a long while.
On the next line, which is the 2nd of January, the following signs are given: ♀ greatest brilliancy; ♁ in perihelion ☌ ♆ ☾; the first of which means that Venus has reached its greatest brightness; the second, that the Earth is the nearest to the Sun that it will get, and the third, that there is a conjunction of Neptune and the Moon; and so on for every day of the year.
Note: A good almanac for daily star information is the Old Farmers’ Almanac, a copy of which you can get by sending 11 cents to William Ware and Company, Boston, Mass.