Kundli in plain words

A kundli, in the sense Astro uses the word, is the sky at one moment and one place, drawn in the sidereal zodiac. The inputs are the date, the clock time, and the place. The place becomes a latitude, a longitude, and a timezone. Longitudes of the Sun, Moon, planets, and the lunar nodes come from an ephemeris. Lahiri ayanamsa shifts those longitudes off the tropical zodiac used in Western astrology. Houses, nakshatra, and Vimshottari dasha are then rules applied to those longitudes.

Four labels are enough to read the result without a drawing: lagna, the Moon's sign, the Moon's nakshatra, and the running dasha. This note says what each label is. It does not read anyone's life from them. The public Kundli page does not draw the chart in this beta, and the numbers have not been signed off against a set of pandit charts.

Three inputs, and nothing else

Date, clock time, and place are the whole intake. Date without a timezone is not yet an instant. "15 January" in Dumka is a different universal moment from "15 January" if someone silently assumes a foreign clock. Place is how the portal chooses latitude, longitude, and the India timezone. A city on the list is used as the city point. A village the list does not know needs a nearby city, not a guessed pin in the river.

Clock time is the fragile one. The lagna changes about every two hours. A remembered "evening" can cover more than one rising sign. The note on uncertain birth time is about what to leave blank. Inventing 6:00 or 12:00 so a form will accept the row invents a chart.

Date, time, and place are the inputs. The clock is drawn without numbers because a rough memory is not a minute.

What the calculator does

An ephemeris returns geometric longitudes. Astro's engine uses a modern one, the same class of computation as other drik software, and then applies Lahiri. It does not rent a prose essay from an astrology API. The model that talks about a chart, on the assistant, is required to read those numbers. It is not allowed to invent a planet's sign.

Houses in this beta's locked method are whole sign. The sign that is rising becomes the first house. The next sign is the second house, and so on around the twelve. There is no further slicing of a sign into unequal houses in v1. A North Indian diamond, when a page draws one, is that whole-sign figure. The page does not draw it yet. An empty diamond in a lesson is a teaching shape, not a birth.

The lunar nodes are mean Rahu, with Ketu opposite. Nakshatra and pada come from the Moon's sidereal longitude. Vimshottari periods come from that nakshatra, using the nine lords and the year lengths in the nakshatra note: 7, 20, 6, 10, 7, 18, 16, 19, and 17, in the order Ketu, Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury.

The four labels

Lagna is the sign rising on the eastern horizon at that clock time and latitude. It is the fastest of the four labels. A wrong hour is a different lagna. A right hour at the wrong latitude can also move it, which is why "somewhere in Jharkhand" is not a place.

Rashi, here, means the Moon's sign. The Moon takes a little over two days to cross a sign. It is more stable than the lagna, and it is still capable of changing on the birth date if the birth fell near the edge.

Nakshatra is which of the twenty-seven mansions holds the Moon at that moment. That is the birth nakshatra. It is not the nakshatra printed for today on a panchang.

Dasha is the Vimshottari period counted from that birth nakshatra. The running mahadasha is a name and a span in the 120-year cycle. The name is a label from the count. It is not a forecast of marriage, money, health, or death.

The eastern point is the lagna, the sign that was rising. The diamond is empty because this note is not a birth.

A kundli here is four labels from a saved birth. It is not a promise about the life that follows.

What a pandit does, and what the beta has not finished

By hand, a pandit turns the birth clock into a time since sunrise, takes the lagna from a table for that latitude, and takes planet positions from a printed ephemeris, minus the ayanamsa. Software in a shop does the same steps. Our calculator is that sheet in code. A wrong lagna is a dead product, because people compare it with the chart they already trust.

The births used as a private check are not yet a fixture file on the portal. Until a set of known charts matches on lagna, Moon nakshatra, and the running mahadasha, the four labels are a beta reading of the sky. They are not a certified copy of a printed kundli. The public page says the chart is not drawn. The assistant can show the four labels from a saved profile and will say that today's panchang is not available. Treat both as beta.

What may be said out loud

The assistant may repeat the four labels the portal calculated for the saved profile, and it may say that today's panchang is not available. It may not invent a planet's house to fill a silence. It may not turn a mahadasha name into a date of marriage, a medical outcome, or a court result. A question about someone else's chart is out of scope for this personal record. Those limits are the same limits as the page: belief and reflection, with the arithmetic left in the engine.

If a label surprises you because a pandit you trust printed a different lagna, keep both and treat the difference as a check that has not been finished. The usual causes are the clock time, the city point, and the ayanamsa. They are not a reason to let a paragraph of prose overwrite the table.

A note on Astro is for understanding. It is a matter of belief and reflection. It is not a promise about health, death, money, or the law.

What Astro is, in this beta: https://astro.lawazia.tech/about