Distance from the Sun
A planet's distance from the Sun is one measurement that traditional practice cuts into four named bands — free of the beams, under the beams, combust, and cazimi. The bands are wildly uneven in width, and the innermost one reverses the reading of the rest.
The fuller picture
This is the parent of a family rather than a rule of its own. The four bands and where their edges sit are set out on the combustion page; what is worth holding here is the shape of the scale. It is one continuous quantity — the separation between a planet and the Sun in the zodiac — and the tradition reads it in four steps that are nothing like evenly spaced. The outermost band runs from seventeen degrees to a hundred and eighty. The under-the-beams band runs from 8°30′ to 17°. Combustion runs inward from 8°30′ to the cazimi line. The innermost is seventeen arcminutes wide and carries the strongest positive mark on the accidental table, right beside the strongest negative one. So the difference between the best and worst thing that can happen to a planet by circumstance is less than a third of a degree of travel.
What gets measured is narrower than the picture the words suggest. iHorary takes the separation in ecliptic longitude alone, with no test of the planet's latitude, so a planet sitting close to the Sun in longitude counts as close even when it stands well north or south of the Sun in the sky. That is a real simplification and worth knowing about: the bands are named after visibility, and the measurement is not a visibility calculation. The solar condition is also computed for five planets only. The Sun cannot be at a distance from itself, and the Moon's relationship to the Sun is reported in this app as her phase and her course — waxing or waning, and what she next aspects — rather than on this scale.
The band a planet lands in does not say which way it is travelling, and that is the omission that costs readings. A planet six degrees clear of the Sun and widening has been through something; a planet three degrees clear and closing is walking into it. Both are outside the combustion line and neither is described by the label. The practice we follow reads the direction explicitly, calling a significator separating from combustion by nearly six degrees exactly that; and a classical aphorism about a short life treats a planet applying to combustion as worse than one leaving it.
Because these are hard cuts across a continuous quantity, the exact figure matters more than the band name does. Rules that fire on the word "combust" fire or stay silent on the strength of a boundary, so a planet a few arcminutes on one side of a line is judged differently from one a few arcminutes on the other. Two Bryan charts imply a slightly wider modern bracket, above eight degrees thirty-five minutes and below nine degrees forty-one. iHorary does not blend that bracket into a made-up midpoint: C-197 follows Lilly's explicit 8°30′ figure and records the difference openly.
The same measurement does one more job. Outside the beams, whether a planet stands ahead of the Sun or behind it in zodiacal order decides whether it is a morning or an evening star, which is a separate fortitude with its own reading and its own timing rule.
In your chart
Every planet's solar condition is named in its dossier as Free of the beams, Under the beams, Combust or Cazimi, on the same Accidental row as its house strength and its posture relative to the Sun, and it feeds the accidental score shown beside that row. Cazimi is tested before combustion, so no planet is ever reported as both. Where a significator is combust or cazimi the judgment engine records it at the top of its evidential scale, negative or positive, and may name it as the load-bearing testimony behind the answer.
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