Quick Start: Cast Your First Full Sidereal Birth Chart

This walkthrough takes you from an empty form to a complete chart you can begin reading straight away. You will need three pieces of information: the place of birth, the date of birth, and the local clock time as it read at that place. No astronomy knowledge or UTC conversion is required — the app handles all of that internally.

Birth time matters most. The signs of the Moon and planets shift slowly over the course of a day, but the rising sign (Lagna) changes roughly once every two hours, and all twelve houses are built from it. A chart cast with an unknown or rounded time is still useful for the slower factors, but treat the Lagna and house placements with caution. If you are unsure of the exact time, see Troubleshooting → I don’t know my exact birth time.

Open the Individual Chart tab

The app opens on Individual Chart by default. You will see a short form with four fields: an optional Name, a Place of birth, a Date of birth, and a Time of birth. Leave the Name field blank if you prefer — it is used only for labelling the output.

Enter the place of birth

Start typing a city name into the Place of birth field. The app searches a built-in place database and presents matches, each showing its coordinates and IANA time zone. For example, typing Mumbai produces:

Mumbai, IN        19.073°, 72.883° · Asia/Kolkata
Navi Mumbai, IN   19.037°, 73.016° · Asia/Kolkata
Panvel, IN        18.989°, 73.110° · Asia/Kolkata

Click the correct match. The app fills in the latitude, longitude, and time zone automatically and displays a confirmation line such as:

Using 19.0728°, 72.8826° · timezone Asia/Kolkata

These three values — latitude, longitude, time zone — are what the calculation engine actually uses.

Place not in the list, or need exact coordinates? Click Enter coordinates to type latitude, longitude, and time zone directly. This is the most precise option and is especially useful for small towns, specific hospitals, or historical place names that appear under a different spelling. See Casting a chart → Entering the birth place for details.

Set the date and time

Choose the day, month, and year of birth from the date picker. Then enter the Time of birth exactly as it read on a local clock at the place of birth. The app combines that clock time with the time zone you selected in Step 2 and converts to Universal Time internally — you do not need to perform any UTC arithmetic yourself.

Click Generate chart

Click the Generate chart button. The app computes the full sidereal chart and displays the results below the form. A summary line at the top confirms what was cast, for example:

Mumbai, IN · 2026-06-01 10:30 (Asia/Kolkata, UTC+05:30)

If any required field is missing the app highlights it in red before computing — go back and fill it in, then click again.

Read the Planets table

Scroll to the Planets table. Each row corresponds to one planet or lunar node and tells you its most important placement facts:

Column	Meaning
House	Which of the 12 houses (life areas) the body occupies.
Sign / Rāśi	The sidereal zodiac sign it sits in.
Degree	Its exact position within that sign, to arc-minutes.
Nakṣatra · Pada	The lunar mansion and its quarter — important for the daśā system and fine-grained reading.
Status	Dignity flags such as Exalted, Debilitated, Own sign, or Great friend.

Two rows give you the headline of any Vedic chart: Lagna (your rising sign, the first house cusp — the lens through which the whole chart is read) and Moon (your emotional nature and the anchor of the daśā timing system).

Go deeper with panels

Above the chart wheel you will find a row of panels you can switch on one at a time. Each adds a layer of classical analysis on top of the natal positions:

Vimśottarī Daśā — the 120-year timeline of planetary periods that governs the unfolding of a life; see which period you are currently in and what follows.
Gochara — a live view of where the planets are transiting today, mapped against your natal chart.
Tājaka — the Varshaphal annual chart for any chosen year of life.
Shadbala — the six-fold numerical strength measurement for each planet, shown in virūpas alongside the classical minimum thresholds.
Ashtakavarga — benefic-point maps showing which signs and houses carry the strongest support across the chart.

Save or share your chart

Below the panel row you will find four export options:

Copy share link — copies a URL to your clipboard that reopens this exact chart for anyone who has it.
Full report (PDF) — generates a complete, printable reading covering all panels.
Copy chart — copies a clean Markdown summary you can paste into a note, email, or document.
Offline copy — saves a self-contained version you can open without an internet connection.

See Sharing and exporting for a full description of what each export contains.

That is a complete sidereal birth chart. You now have the natal positions, house placements, dignity statuses, and the keys to every analytical panel.

Wondering why your Sun or Moon landed in a different sign than your Western chart shows? That is not a mistake — it is the sidereal zodiac at work. Read Why Jyotiṣa Uses a Sidereal Zodiac for the full explanation, then explore The Sidereal Sky to understand how the engine builds the sky behind your chart.