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The ayanāṁśa is the angle subtracted from each tropical longitude to produce the sidereal positions you see in your chart. Because astronomers and jyotiṣīs have measured the precessional gap in slightly different ways over the centuries, more than one value is in use today. Jyoti Guide supports three ayanāṁśas and recomputes every planet, nakṣatra, and divisional chart the moment you change the setting — nothing in the chart is ever left on a mismatched value.

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The three options

OptionAlso calledCharacter
LahiriChitrapakṣaThe official ayanāṁśa of the Indian national calendar and the most widely used value worldwide. This is the app default.
RamanRamanB. V. Raman’s value, roughly 2–3 arc-minutes smaller than Lahiri; standard among readers in the Raman lineage.
PushyaPushya-pakṣaAnchors the zodiac so that the reference star of the Puṣya nakṣatra falls at a fixed sidereal point.

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How much does the choice change?

In most charts, very little — the three values differ by only a fraction of a degree. The practical consequences only appear at boundaries:
  • A planet sitting within a few arc-minutes of a sign edge can flip into the neighbouring sign when you switch.
  • A planet near a nakṣatra or pada boundary can shift its nakṣatra, which cascades into Vimśottarī daśā start dates and D9 placements.
For the vast majority of placements, all three ayanāṁśas agree and the chart reads the same way regardless of which you have selected.

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Which should you use?

Use this three-point guide to decide:
  1. Use Lahiri unless you have a specific reason not to. It is the default, the most widely used worldwide, and the safest choice when comparing notes with other readers and software.
  2. Use Raman if you study or practise in the Raman tradition and want results that are consistent with that lineage’s books and printed tables.
  3. Use Pushya if your method or teacher specifically calls for a Puṣya-anchored zodiac.
When in doubt, stay with Lahiri. The differences are small enough that switching purely out of curiosity rarely changes any meaningful interpretation.

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Where to set it

The Ayanāṁśa selector sits directly above the chart wheel in both the Individual Chart view and the Workbench. Selecting a different value triggers a full re-fetch from the calculation engine, so every position — planets, houses, navāṁśa, daśā periods — updates together. You will never see a chart where the sign positions were computed with one ayanāṁśa and the nakṣatras with another.
Whenever you compare Jyoti Guide’s output to another source — a book, a different program, or an astrologer’s printed reading — check that the ayanāṁśa matches first. Most apparent discrepancies between two “Vedic” charts come down to a different ayanāṁśa. Note also that this app uses the mean node convention for Rāhu and Ketu, which is a second common source of differences.
For the rationale behind sidereal positions in general, see Why Sidereal?. To see how the ayanāṁśa selector fits into the chart workflow, see Individual Chart.