One row in the Royal Museums Greenwich table contains a year, a Lunar New Year date and an animal. It is a useful compact display, provided each column is read for what it says. The date tells readers when Lunar New Year falls in the listed year. The animal gives the museum’s zodiac association for that year. The year helps locate the row. Treating these as separate pieces of information keeps the table useful without turning its layout into an unstated rule about every zodiac boundary.
The museum lists 6 February for 2027 beside the goat and 26 January for 2028 beside the monkey. It then pairs 13 February 2029 with the rooster and 2 February 2030 with the dog. These entries show both that the festival date varies and that the museum associates particular animals with particular years. They do not, by themselves, spell out a universal rule for the exact instant at which every animal-year designation changes. That distinction matters when a question asks for more precision than a table supplies.
The date column has a calendar explanation. Royal Museums Greenwich describes the Chinese calendar as lunisolar, based on both the Moon’s phases and Earth’s orbit around the Sun. In its account, the first day of a month is the date of the new Moon. The festival begins on the first day of the first month and ends with the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day. The museum also says an ordinary calendar year has twelve months, while a leap year has thirteen. Those details explain why reading this calendar involves more than matching a month name to a fixed Gregorian date.
The Hong Kong Observatory states its convention for a related, more specific question: it marks the start of a Chinese calendar year, and the change of its Gan-Zhi designation, on the first day of the first Chinese calendar month. Its example from 2018 separates two dates that can be confused. “Spring Commences” fell on 4 February, while the first day of the first month fell on 16 February. The Observatory says some popular calendars use “Spring Commences” for the Gan-Zhi change instead of its official practice. This evidence establishes a calendar and Gan-Zhi convention; it does not explicitly establish a general zodiac-animal boundary.
For a particular date, the Observatory provides a Gregorian–Chinese calendar conversion table covering 1901 through 2100. That is a more suitable place to check a calendar date than an animal label alone. The Observatory also cautions that calculations many decades ahead can differ by a day when a new Moon or solar term falls close to midnight. The caution concerns the precision of some calculated calendar entries. It is another reason to name the question first: a conversion date, a Gan-Zhi label and a museum animal association are related entries, but they are not identical claims.
Royal Museums Greenwich gives the animal sequence as rat, ox, tiger, hare or rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. It says the twelve-animal sequence repeats five times within a sixty-year naming cycle. Its account also notes variations between countries: Vietnam uses a cat in place of the rabbit and a buffalo in place of the ox. The table can therefore be read as a record of cultural associations alongside an explanation of calendar dates. The astronomical mechanism behind the dates does not turn the animal meanings into measurements of people.
NASA describes astronomy as a scientific study using evidence and data. It says astrology’s claims about predicting a future or describing a person from the sky are not based on scientific evidence. An animal association may still serve as a cultural symbol or a source of entertainment, but astrology is not a scientific prediction method. Invitation for reflection, not a factual effect: pick one of the museum’s four rows, write down its date and animal in separate lines, and ask exactly what each item tells you.
Astrology is entertainment and an invitation to reflect. It does not predict events or replace professional advice.