Accuracy first — every position comes from DE440, NASA JPL's most precise planetary ephemeris.
Accuracy first — every position comes from DE440, NASA JPL's most precise planetary ephemeris.
A Kundli is the sky at the moment you were born, drawn as a chart. Give it your date, time and place of birth and every position is worked out from the same ephemeris observatories use.
Why your birth time matters
The rising sign moves a whole sign every two hours, and the twelve houses are counted from it — so an hour's error can shift every position into a different house. Give the time as precisely as you know it.
What you'll get
The Lagna — the sign rising on the eastern horizon — moves through a whole sign about every two hours, and it is what the twelve houses are counted from. So the date alone fixes where the planets are, while the time fixes which house each one falls in. An hour's error rarely moves a planet far; it routinely moves the entire house structure by one place, which changes what every position is read to mean.
Vedic astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, measured against the fixed stars, while newspaper horoscopes use the tropical one, measured from the equinox. The two have drifted roughly twenty-four degrees apart, which is a little under one sign — so a great many people find their Vedic sun sign is the one before the sign they grew up calling theirs. Neither is a mistake; they are two different measurements, and this is the one that Vedic calculation has always used.
The main chart describes the life as a whole. The divisional charts — vargas — cut each sign into smaller parts and are read for particular areas, the ninth for marriage and fortune, the tenth for work. They are not other charts of another person: they are the same positions at higher magnification, and a planet strong in the main chart and weak in a varga is telling you where that strength does and does not reach.
The Vimshottari system divides a notional hundred and twenty years into planetary periods, each subdivided again. What a dasha says is which planet's themes are prominent in a stretch of time — not what will happen in it. The same period runs very differently for two people whose charts place that planet differently, which is why the period is read against the chart rather than on its own.
It is arithmetic: positions, houses, divisions, periods and strengths, calculated and shown with the working visible. It is not an interpretation, and it does not pretend to be one. What it gives you is the accurate material a reading is built from.