Frequently asked questions
Answers to the questions we get asked most about Jyotira, your chart, and how the readings are produced.
What do I need to get my birth chart?
Three details:
- Date of birth.
- Time of birth, as precisely as you can get it. A birth certificate or hospital record is the most reliable source.
- Place of birth, meaning the town or city rather than the country.
The time is the part worth chasing down. The rising sign advances about one degree every four minutes, so an error of a couple of hours will usually move you into a different rising sign and reorganise the houses in your chart. The Moon moves fast enough to change nakshatra within a single day, which shifts the timing of your dasha periods.
If you genuinely do not know your birth time, a chart can still be cast, but the parts that depend on the exact moment should be treated as provisional.
What is Vedic astrology?
Vedic astrology, known in Sanskrit as Jyotish, is the astrological tradition of the Indian subcontinent. The name translates as "science of light".
It differs from Western astrology in two main ways. First, it uses the sidereal zodiac, measured against the fixed stars, rather than the tropical zodiac measured from the spring equinox. Second, it uses the nakshatras, a 27-fold division of the sky tied to the Moon's motion, alongside the twelve signs.
It also has its own timing systems. The best known is Vimshottari dasha, which divides a life into planetary periods starting from the Moon's position at birth, and which is used to say when a placement in the chart is most active.