Free Vedic Birth Chart Calculator

You give three things: a date, a clock time and a place. First, the clock time is converted to universal time using the rules of your birth place for that year. Second, the tool works out where each planet stood at that instant, as seen from the centre of the Earth. Third, it subtracts the Lahiri ayanamsha, which moves each position from the Western zodiac to the Vedic one.

Fourth, it finds the lagna, the sign coming up over the eastern horizon at your latitude and longitude. That sign becomes house 1, the next sign becomes house 2, and so on around all twelve. This is the whole-sign method, so every planet in a sign falls in the same house. Your birth place affects only the time conversion and the lagna. The planet signs themselves depend only on the instant of birth.

A kundali is a snapshot of the sky, drawn as twelve houses. It records positions, and on its own it is not a forecast. Most of what a family elder or pandit reads from it rests on a few ideas, and knowing these makes the chart much less intimidating.

Start at house 1 and note its sign. Then find the Moon, because the Moon's sign and star are the facts most often asked for at ceremonies. Next, look at each house in turn: which sign it holds, which planets sit in it, and which planet rules that sign. Mars rules Aries and Scorpio, Venus rules Taurus and Libra, Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo, the Moon rules Cancer, the Sun rules Leo, Jupiter rules Sagittarius and Pisces, and Saturn rules Capricorn and Aquarius.

Planets also look across the chart, which is called an aspect. On the Parashari whole-sign count, every planet aspects the 7th sign from itself. Mars adds the 4th and 8th, Jupiter adds the 5th and 9th, and Saturn adds the 3rd and 10th. A retrograde mark means the planet appeared to move backward against the stars at your birth. Rahu and Ketu always show this mark here, because the mean node always moves backward.

Each house has traditional themes. They give you a vocabulary for talking with an elder or pandit, and they say nothing definite about any one person's life.

The navamsa, or D9, divides each 30-degree sign into nine equal parts of 3 degrees 20 minutes. Each part is linked to a sign, so every planet gets a second sign in addition to its D1 sign. The sign linked to your lagna's part becomes house 1 of the D9, and the other houses follow in order. The count runs unbroken around the zodiac from Aries, which gives the classical pattern shown in this table.

Families commonly turn to the D9 when discussing marriage and when weighing how strong a planet is in the D1. A sensible habit is to read the D1 first and treat the D9 as a second look, not a separate story.

The D9 is much more sensitive to birth time than the D1. The lagna moves about a degree every four minutes, so the D9 lagna can change about every 13 minutes. The Moon's D9 sign changes about every six hours. Slower planets hold their D9 sign far longer. If your birth time is rounded or estimated, treat the D9 lagna and D9 houses with caution.

Both drawings show exactly the same planets in exactly the same signs. Only the layout differs. The North Indian chart keeps the houses in fixed places and moves the signs around them. The South Indian chart keeps the signs in fixed places and marks where the lagna falls.

The most common slip when reading a North Indian chart is to take the number in a box as the house number. It is the sign: 1 means Aries and 12 means Pisces. In a South Indian chart, find the box marked Asc and count clockwise from it, starting at 1, to reach any house. Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam families usually grew up with the South Indian grid, and many Hindi-speaking families with the North Indian diamond, so use whichever your family elder or pandit reads.

Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, tied to the seasons, so Aries always starts at the March equinox. Vedic astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, tied to the stars. The two drift apart slowly, and the gap between them is the ayanamsha. On the Lahiri value it is about 24 degrees today. It was closer to 23 degrees for births in the 1940s.

A sign is 30 degrees wide, so a shift of about 24 degrees moves a position back into the previous sign about four times out of five. That applies to your Sun, your Moon and your rising sign alike. This is why someone who has always read a Leo horoscope in a magazine can find their Vedic Sun in Cancer. Neither system is correcting the other. They measure from different starting points, and this page shows your Western signs next to the Vedic ones so you can see the shift for yourself.

Two sites can disagree without either making an arithmetic mistake, because each has to choose its conventions. These are ours, stated openly. Our positions are checked against Swiss Ephemeris 2.10.03 in our test suite, and the tool accepts birth years from 1900 to 2100.

Historic time zones matter more than most people expect. We read the time zone database for the birth year, not today's rules. India used +6:30 from 1942 to 1945, an hour ahead of standard time, apart from a few months in mid-1942. Read at today's +5:30, a wartime clock time would be a full hour out, which is enough to change the lagna. Before 1906, India's zone data carries an offset of +5:21:10. Britain ran at two hours ahead of Greenwich in wartime summers, and the United States kept clocks forward all year during much of the Second World War.

When clocks went back and a time happened twice, we use the first one, which is daylight time, and tell you. When clocks went forward and a time never appeared on the clock, we read it using the zone in force just before the change, and tell you that too. One limit to know about: the database merges places that have agreed since 1970, so a town that kept its own rules before then, such as some US towns before the 1966 Uniform Time Act, gets the rules of its zone's main city.

Yes, with limits, and the tool says so plainly. If you tick that you do not know the time, it uses 12:00 noon, the usual stand-in. The Moon sign and planet signs are usually still right. The lagna, the houses and anything counted from them may be wrong, so treat those parts as a placeholder.

The tool also checks the whole birth date. If the Moon changed sign or nakshatra that day, you get a note that the Moon sign, or the birth star and dasha dates, depend on the time. Even with a known time, you see a caution when the lagna sits within 1.25 degrees of a sign's edge, which is roughly five minutes of birth time, and for births at polar latitudes of 66 degrees or more, where the ascendant moves very unevenly.

A birth certificate or hospital record is the best source for the time. If neither is available, an older relative or a family horoscope may have it written down, even if the rest of the details have faded.