Our Vedic method, and where your positions come from

The same sky, a different origin

The positions come from NASA's JPL DE442 ephemerides, exactly as they do for your Western chart: the astronomy does not change from one tradition to the next. What changes is the origin the longitudes are measured from.

Western astrology starts from the vernal point, which slides slowly along the zodiac; Jyotish starts from the stars themselves. The gap between the two, the ayanamsa, is close to twenty-four degrees today, almost a whole sign. We use Lahiri, the ayanamsa official in India, and we say so rather than leave you guessing: two ayanamsas give two charts.

Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) ayanamsa, adopted by the Indian Calendar Reform Committee. JPL DE442 ephemerides (NASA/JPL), the same ones our Western astrology uses.

Whole-sign houses and nakshatras

Jyotish does not cut the houses into uneven slices: a sign is a house. Your ascendant gives the first, the next sign the second, and so on. It is simpler, older, and it does not depend on the latitude you were born at.

To that it adds what the West lost: the twenty-seven nakshatras, the lunar mansions, each divided into four padas. Your Moon's position within its nakshatra opens the sequence of dashas, and the whole predictive reading starts there.

Divisional charts, and time

A Vedic chart is not read on a single map. We compute nine divisional charts, from D1 to D60: each cuts the signs more finely and lights up one area, the couple, work, lineage, the spiritual share. Their schools are frozen, Parashari Hora and the BPHS Trimsamsa with its five uneven segments, because a divisional chart computed under two schools gives two answers.

Time is read through dashas, those nested periods that unfold a hundred and twenty years from your birth, and through transits, the most dreaded of them being Saturn's Sade Sati. We date that one from first entry to last exit, backward steps included, as the tradition does: Saturn sometimes retrogrades out of the sign before returning to it, and stopping at its first exit would cut a year off the period.

See the Jyotish encyclopedia →

What gets checked, and how

The classical tables are not copied out on trust. Ashtakavarga, which counts the benefic points each planet receives in each sign, carries its own guardrails: the treatises give every planet's total, forty-eight for the Sun, forty-nine for the Moon, and three hundred and thirty-seven for the whole. Our tables are checked against those totals on every run, so a wrong line cannot slip through unnoticed.

The same demand applies to the hours: sunrise and sunset, on which the Panchanga and Rahu Kaal depend, share their sidereal time and their obliquity with the ascendant calculation. A sunrise therefore cannot diverge from the ascendant it governs.

Ashtakavarga after the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra; control totals 48 / 49 / 39 / 54 / 56 / 52 / 39, sum 337.