Conjunction
A conjunction is two planets at the same degree of the zodiac — the closest contact there is, and the strongest way a chart can join the two sides of a question. Its character comes from the planets involved, not from the angle.
The fuller picture
A conjunction is 0° of separation: the two bodies occupy the same degree, and rather than looking at each other across the chart they arrive in the same place. The older writers call it a corporal conjunction for exactly that reason — a joining of bodies rather than a ray thrown between them — and it's the term you'll see in worked delineations where a significator comes to the body of another planet. Of the ways two significators can be joined, it's the strongest: conjunction first, then trine, then sextile.
The distinction that matters is that a conjunction has no manner of its own. A trine meets less resistance and a square brings difficulty before you know which planets are involved; neither geometry tells you whether the result is beneficial. Two benefics coming together and a significator coming to Saturn are the same conjunction and opposite news. The conjunction is therefore treated separately from the graded aspect ladder, as the strongest contact rather than as a rung. The interface leaves conjunctions and soft aspects in plain ink: colouring either as favourable would assert a benefit the angle does not carry.
The Sun is the case that catches people. A conjunction with the Sun is combustion, so the closest contact available in a chart is also the one that can put a planet out of action, and within seventeen arcminutes of exactness the same contact becomes cazimi and turns into the strongest fortification on the board. Both of those are conjunctions. And even combustion isn't automatically bad news: where the Sun rules the other party in a relationship question and applies to the planet standing for the person asking, being made combust is the union itself perfecting.
One more thing a conjunction does that an aspect can't. Reception normally works by aspect — a planet aspecting the planet that rules the place it occupies. Arriving bodily at your own dispositor is read as a stronger form of that same welcome than reaching it by ray, and it's used as a tie-break where two candidate significators are otherwise equally weak. So a conjunction to a dispositor is worth more than an aspect to one.
In our engine a conjunction between the two significators counts as a perfection at full weight, and drops one grade when either of them is Mars or Saturn — the merge takes the malefic's nature, which is the same reasoning as the paragraph above, applied to the verdict rather than to the colour.
In your chart
Select a conjunction on the wheel and the dossier names it, gives the orb to the arcminute and estimates how many days until it perfects, with the receptions in both directions beside it — and the glyph stays untoned, because the two planets decide what it means. Every planet's distance from the Sun is labelled separately as free of the beams, under the beams, combust or cazimi, so a conjunction with the Sun is reported as the solar condition it is rather than only as an aspect. In the judgment, a conjunction between the two rulers is a perfection path at critical weight, downgraded one grade when a malefic is one of the pair.
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