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Most problems in Jyoti Guide come down to a missing input, a convention mismatch with another program, or a natural feature of the luni-solar calendar. Work through the relevant section below and your chart should look exactly as expected. If nothing here resolves your issue, the Still stuck? section at the bottom explains how to capture your chart state for further review.
The Generate chart button stays disabled until place, date, and time are all filled in. The form displays a message telling you exactly what is still missing — for example, “Still needed: place of birth, time of birth.”The most common cause is typing a place name without actually selecting it from the search results dropdown. You must pick a result so the app can record the coordinates and time zone. Typed text alone is not enough.
Click Enter coordinates to switch to manual entry. You can then type the latitude, longitude, and UTC time zone offset directly. This is also the right option when you need:
  • Exact hospital or village coordinates not found by the place search.
  • A historical time-zone offset that differs from the location’s current one (for example, pre-independence India used a different standard meridian).
Birth time mainly affects the fast-moving parts of the chart. Understanding what is sensitive — and what isn’t — helps you work with an uncertain time confidently.
The Lagna (rising sign) changes roughly every two hours. If your birth time is off by even an hour, the Lagna, all twelve house cusps, every divisional chart, and your Vimśottarī daśā start dates can shift significantly. Treat these as provisional whenever your time is uncertain.
The planetary signs and nakṣatras are far more forgiving — the Moon moves about one nakṣatra per day, and other planets move more slowly still, so these are usually reliable even with a rough time.
Generate the chart for several candidate times — for example, on the hour across your likely birth window. Check which placements remain stable across all versions; those are the factors you can read with confidence. Pay special attention to whether the Lagna stays in the same sign or flips.
Be especially cautious with high divisional charts (D24, D60): a small time error can move a planet into a completely different sign at that harmonic level. P. V. R. Narasimha Rao’s Integrated Approach (ch. 32) discusses this sensitivity in depth.
This is almost always caused by a difference in one of five conventions. Work through each in turn:
  1. Tropical vs. sidereal — most Western software uses the tropical zodiac, which places planets roughly 24° ahead of the sidereal positions this app uses. If the other source is Western, the difference is expected.
  2. Ayanāṁśa — Lahiri, Raman, and Pushya can each shift a borderline planet by a sign or nakṣatra. Match the ayanāṁśa first using Ayanāṁśa options, then compare again.
  3. House system — Jyoti Guide uses whole-sign houses. Programs that use Placidus, Koch, or another quadrant system will assign some planets to neighbouring houses.
  4. Node type — mean node vs. true node can move Rāhu and Ketu by up to a degree or two.
  5. Reading school — for Shadbala specifically, different schools apply different formulas and give different totals. See Shadbala → Reading schools.
Reconcile all five settings and the charts should agree.
Changing the ayanāṁśa re-fetches the entire chart, because every sidereal position shifts together — there is no way to update only part of the chart. A brief recompute pause is expected behaviour, not a bug.To avoid repeated reloads, pick your preferred ayanāṁśa before you start exploring panels. If you are comparing ayanāṁśas systematically, open each in a separate browser tab.
The Workbench is designed for wide screens and places multiple panels side-by-side. On a narrow browser window or a small display, switch to the standard Individual Chart view, which stacks the same panels vertically and works well at any screen width.
This is by design, not a contradiction. The Ashtakūṭa total and the dosha flags are separate signals that the app reports independently:
  • A good Ashtakūṭa total (say, 28 out of 36) reflects the aggregate of the eight kūṭas.
  • A Bhakūṭa, Nāḍī, or Mangal dosha is a specific concern that can coexist with — and in classical practice can override — an otherwise high total.
Read both signals together, and also examine the marriage houses in the D1 and D9 charts. See Assessing a match for a complete methodology.
Festival and Ekādaśī dates follow the luni-solar Hindu calendar, not the civil (Gregorian) calendar, so they shift each year. Two factors are commonly overlooked:
  • Adhika māsa (leap month) — roughly every three years, a leap month is inserted, which can push a festival by an entire civil month. See Panchāng → the leap month.
  • Location sensitivity — tithi transitions and sunrise times are calculated for a specific place. Confirm that the chart’s location is set to the right city, because even a time zone difference can change which day a tithi falls on.
Use Copy chart to export a clean Markdown summary of everything the app has computed — every planet, house, Shadbala score, daśā period, and setting in one block of text. It is the fastest way to capture the exact state of a chart so you can compare it against another source or share it for review.
The Copy chart export includes your ayanāṁśa, reading school, and node-type settings alongside the computed values, so whoever you share it with can see precisely which conventions produced the numbers.