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City comparison

Bangkok vs Chiang Mai

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
582 km
5.2° of orb
Latitude gap
5.0°
13.76°N against 18.79°N
Solar time apart
0.1 h
1.5° of longitude

In short

Neither city is better. A place has no fixed character, it has a relationship with one particular birth chart, and Bangkok and Chiang Mai 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.

Bangkok, Thailand

Position
13.76°N, 100.5°E
tropical latitudes, northern hemisphere
Time zone
Asia/Bangkok
Clocks run 18 minutes ahead of the local sun
Lines that can reach it
All forty
A body more than 76.2° from the celestial equator never rises or sets here
Longest day
12 hours 49 minutes
At the summer solstice

inside the tropics, where the sun passes directly overhead twice a year and the seasons are told by rain rather than by light

What Bangkok asks of a person →

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Position
18.79°N, 99.0°E
tropical latitudes, northern hemisphere
Time zone
Asia/Bangkok
Clocks run 24 minutes ahead of the local sun
Lines that can reach it
All forty
A body more than 71.2° from the celestial equator never rises or sets here
Longest day
13 hours 8 minutes
At the summer solstice

inside the tropics, where the sun passes directly overhead twice a year and the seasons are told by rain rather than by light

What Chiang Mai 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 582 km apart, which is 5.2° of great-circle distance. A planetary line counts as reaching a place within about two degrees, so two cities 5.2° 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

Bangkok sits at 13.76°N and Chiang Mai at 18.79°N a gap of 5.0°. That is not a detail of climate; it decides which lines can exist. At Bangkok a body further than 76.2° from the celestial equator never rises or sets, and at Chiang Mai the limit is 71.2°. 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

1.5° of longitude separates them, about 0.1 hours of solar time. Against their own clocks, midday in Bangkok arrives 18 minutes after the sun is actually overhead, and in Chiang Mai, 24 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 Bangkok or Chiang Mai 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. Bangkok may sit almost exactly on a line of yours while Chiang Mai 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 Bangkok and Chiang Mai?

    582 km, great-circle. In the units this product measures proximity in that is 5.2° of orb, which matters because a planetary line is only considered to reach a place within about 2°. Two cities 5.2° 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 Bangkok and at Chiang Mai.

  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: Bangkok and Chiang Mai are 1.5° of longitude apart, about 0.1 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 168 kilometres.

Your own map

Read Bangkok and Chiang Mai 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.