Every reading rests on choices. Most products hide theirs behind the word “ancient”. Here they are, including the ones where the tradition argues with itself and somebody had to pick.
A prediction is tested by outcomes, and it fails: it names a day, the day comes and goes, and nothing happened. A metaphor is tested differently — by resonance and by use, the way a structure mapped between a myth and a life either finds purchase or it doesn’t. This product manufactures coherence openly and says so out loud, here. Coherence, honestly labelled, is real nourishment; coherence sold as foreknowledge is a con. That is the whole difference between this and a horoscope column, and it is the reason the chart is called a weather report and never a verdict: dashas are seasons, transits are weather, and the sails are entirely yours. Timing content is windows and textures — favourable for X — never “X will happen,” and never a date for anyone’s illness, accident, or loss.
The instruments are shown plainly, and uncertainty is surfaced rather than buried — if your ascendant sits near a sign boundary, the reading says so, states the number of minutes that would flip it, and names the chart you would have instead. And the reading does not hold the last word on itself: you do. A metaphor that lands is data; one that misses is data too, not a failure of the craft, which is why every calibrated section carries a plain hits/partly/misses control rather than asking you to simply agree.
Why does any of this work at all? Three currents, and it is worth naming all three rather than letting the mechanism go unsaid. First, the tradition itself is engineered for resonance: twenty-seven nakshatras, each pre-loaded with an animal, a symbol, a deity and a story, are built to find purchase on almost any life that gets held up against them. Second, you bring the other half — the actual, specific, findable threads of your own years, which no chart supplies and no chart could. Third, the dialogue between the two — what you keep, what you correct, what you tell it missed — is where the reading actually gets made. Naming the mechanism this plainly does not deflate the experience. It dignifies it.
One more thing the method insists on: the wind is never your fault, and the sails are always your job. A chart describes the vessel you were issued and the waters you sail; it does not steer for you, and it never tells you to wait on it before deciding anything for yourself.
The split runs down the middle of this product and never moves. Positions are arithmetic. Sidereal longitudes come from the Swiss Ephemeris; from them the code derives signs, degrees, nakshatras and padas, houses, dignities, the named configurations, the vimshottari timeline and the transit windows. No language model touches any of it.
Meaning is written. A model is handed those finished numbers and asked for one thing: what they might mean, in myth and in practice. It cannot compute a position, cannot move a date, and never sees an ephemeris. If a fable in your report claims a fact, that fact came off this table — and every claim carries a quiet link back to it, in full, at its own page: the whole sky, one hop from anything said about it.
Lahiri ayanamsa. Sidereal astrology measures from the fixed stars rather than the equinox, and the offset between the two has to be fixed by a convention. Lahiri is the Indian government's, and the one most Jyotisha software uses. A different ayanamsa moves every position by roughly the same small amount.
Whole-sign houses. The sign your ascendant falls in is the whole first house; the next sign is the whole second, and so on. This is Saravali's and Brihat Jataka's practice. The received Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra also transmits degree-based cusps, and under those a planet sitting at 29°50′ of a sign lands in a different house entirely. So when something of yours is close to a boundary, the report says so rather than letting the choice pass silently.
The mean node. Rahu and Ketu are not bodies; they are the points where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's. You can take the smoothed average of that motion or the true wobbling one. We take the mean — the classical practice, and the reason the “always retrograde” rule holds. Between 1960 and 2000 the two differ by about a degree on average and by up to 1.94° at worst, which is occasionally enough to move Rahu into a different nakshatra. Worth knowing if you have seen your chart elsewhere and the node does not match.
The Person is built on eight facets — Temperament, Ground, Vessel, Work, Mind, Exchange, Mirror and Depth — each bound to specific houses, planetary significators and one divisional chart of its own. Mirror (partnership) stays off until you ask for it. What follows is each facet's full contract: what it draws on, and the hard line it will not cross — the same contract the comparison grid publishes for an unknown birth time, reused word for word rather than restated more gently for one surface than another.
These are not bugs and not settled questions. The texts disagree, or the corpus is silent and practice diverged. In each case a choice had to be made; here is the choice and what stands against it.
Exaltation: by sign, or by degree?
BPHS 49–50 gives a table of signs, and near-universal practice follows it — Mercury in Virgo is exalted, full stop. BPHS 51–54 then partitions those same signs by degree, so exaltation becomes an arc rather than a sign.
Here: the sign table, which is what a reader will recognise from anywhere else.
Dignity: a label, or a grade?
Both BPHS and Phaladeepika give planetary strength as a ratio — full, three-quarters, half, a quarter, an eighth, nil — and BPHS builds a six-component model on top of it.
Here: one flat label per planet. The precedence order is right; the grading is simply not computed, and a label should never be read as a measurement of strength.
Combustion: whose orbs?
A planet too close to the Sun is asta, set, and how close is too close depends on the authority. Saturn is 15° in the Siddhantasiromani and 16° in the received BPHS; Mercury is 14° in one lineage and 13° in five others.
Here: Siddhantasiromani throughout, so the set is at least internally consistent. The one live disagreement, Saturn's, falls in the disputed band on about 0.6% of days.
Gajakesari: strict, or bare?
BPHS 36.3 requires the Moon in a kendra from Jupiter and a benefic joining or aspecting and the planets not debilitated, combust or in an enemy sign. Phaladeepika 6.14 requires the kendra and nothing else. Varahamihira and Kalyana Varma do not mention the yoga at all.
Here: Phaladeepika's bare form, counted from the Moon, in the rasi chart only; the navamsa is not consulted for it.
Tithi and nakshatra: birth minute, or sunrise?
The tradition cleanly distinguishes the value at the instant of birth — which seeds your dasha — from the value prevailing at sunrise, which is how a printed almanac labels a whole day.
Here: the birth instant, which is the correct natal quantity. It will sometimes disagree with an almanac. Both are right; they answer different questions.
The weekday: midnight, or sunrise?
The tradition counts the day sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight: a birth before dawn carries the previous day's vara. The one classical midnight reckoning fixes a computational epoch, not a native's vara.
Here: sunrise to sunrise, using apparent upper-limb sunrise at sea level, the almanac convention. The civil weekday is kept alongside. Births within about two minutes of sunrise are convention-dependent.
How long is a dasha year?
360 savana days, the Julian 365.25, the tropical 365.2422, or the siddhantic sidereal year — no classical text adjudicates. Only the 360-day option is astrologically distinguishable; it shifts the whole 120-year cycle by about 630 days.
Here: 365.25. An engineering choice with no scripture behind it, which is exactly why it is written down here.
A recorded time before 1956, in India
Indian Standard Time is legally standard from 1906, but Bombay kept its own clock about 39 minutes off IST until the mid-fifties and Calcutta about 23 minutes off until the late forties, alongside railway and municipal clocks. There is no agreed convention for reading such a recorded time.
Here: the recorded time is taken as IST, the only defensible default without your own testimony — and the same default every mainstream package uses.
None of this is a defect; all of it is legitimate engineering. What would not be legitimate is letting you think the tradition mandates it.
Saturn returns have no classical basis anywhere. The idea is a Western import. Indian markers for Saturn are anchored to the Moon — sade sati is the real one. Jupiter returns are more slippery: the twelve-year count is in BPHS, but it is used there to reconstruct an unknown birth year, not to mark a life stage. Both are shown because readers expect them, and both are marked.
Eclipse contacts use a 3° orb, which is a Western aspect orb; the classical material is scoped by sign and by nakshatra instead. “Stationary” is our own threshold — the texts grade eight kinds of planetary motion and fix no percentage for any of them. Deep combustion within one degree is our figure too, though the category itself is classical.
Enumerating charts for an unknown birth time is modern. The classical answer to a lost hour is prashna — a chart cast for the moment of asking. We do not do that. Laying out every chart the day could hold is more auditable and less certain, and we think that is the right trade.
The ascendant moves through the whole zodiac in a day, which means it moves about a degree every four minutes. If yours sits near a sign boundary, a few minutes of error changes the sign it rises in — and everything counted from the ascendant changes with it. So the report measures the distance to that boundary, states how many minutes of error it takes to cross it, and names the chart you would have instead. It does that at the top of the reading, before anything is made of anything.
If no hour was recorded at all, nothing here invents one. The reading falls back to chandra lagna — the Moon's sign standing where the ascendant would — which is the tradition's own fallback, and everything that depends on a rising degree is left out rather than guessed. If the hour is roughly known, the day is opened out into every materially different chart it could hold and you are asked to recognise one. That is a recognition, not a derivation, and every screen of a report built that way says so.
Ten of the sixteen classical divisional charts (vargas) are computed and wired into the facets above: the rasi (D1 — Temperament and Vessel), hora (D2 — Exchange), drekkana (D3 — Work), chaturthamsa (D4 — Ground), navamsa (D9 — Temperament's lagna lord and Mirror's seventh lord and Venus), dasamsa (D10 — Work), dwadasamsa (D12 — computed, but not yet read by any facet), vimsamsa (D20 — Mind), chaturvimsamsa (D24 — Mind) and trimsamsa (D30 — Depth, as texture only, skipped outright when the placement it would read is a luminary). The remaining six — saptamsa (D7), shodasamsa (D16), bhamsa (D27), khavedamsa (D40), akshavedamsa (D45) and shashtiamsa (D60) — along with Ashtakavarga, Shadbala, Gulika and the upagrahas, arudha padas, and vedha in transits, are real parts of the tradition. Their absence is a scope decision, not a judgment on them.
And nothing predicts. Not death, illness, accidents, divorce, job loss, pregnancy, legal outcomes, or disasters — not for you and not for anyone else. Timing is described as windows and seasons, sensitive houses as textures and postures. A metaphor is admitted only if the shared structure can be stated in one sentence of the form both X and Y are…; decorative resemblance is refused. That gate is the difference between this and a horoscope column.
Writing a report takes minutes, so it is written once and kept on this server's disk against your next visit. What is kept is one entry — the sky and the writing about it — filed under a hash of five things: the birth date, the birth time (or the honest statement that it is approximate or unknown), the coordinates rounded to about a hundred metres, and the timezone: exactly what determines a chart. That entry is kept on this server until deleted, and only the browser that created it can delete it. Calibrations, chat turns and margin notes are kept separately, keyed to the reading cookie in the browser that made them rather than to any person, and fall away six months after their last use.
No name is ever asked for, and the place name you typed is not stored — “Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh” beside a birth date is an identity, so what is kept instead is the coordinates it resolved to. Two people born the same minute in the same hundred-metre square share one stored entry, which is the point: an entry describes a sky, and holds no name for either of them. A hash is not the same as anonymous, though, so it is kept as sensitive as the birth details it was made from, and none of it is sold to anyone, ever.