01What is a janam kundli?
A janam kundli is a map of the sky at one moment and one place: the moment you were born. It records the lagna, the sign rising on the eastern horizon at that instant; your chandra rashi, the sign the Moon occupied; your nakshatra and its pada; and the house each of the nine grahas fell into. Everything else in Jyotish is read from it. A dasha timeline starts from the Moon's nakshatra, marriage matching compares two Moons, a dosha is a graha in a particular house. None of it exists before the chart does.
The lagna: the sign rising in the east
The ascendant is the point of the zodiac climbing over the eastern horizon at the moment of birth, and it is the only element of the chart that depends on the place as well as the time. It moves about a degree every four minutes and changes sign roughly every two hours. Because it fixes the first house, every other house in the chart is counted from it.
The chandra rashi: the sign the Moon occupied
In Jyotish your rashi is the sign the Moon stood in at birth, not the sign the Sun stood in. It is what rashifal, Sade Sati and kundli matching are all read from. The Moon crosses a rashi in about two and a quarter days, so the date narrows it and the birth time settles it, which is why so many people find their rashi is not the sign they have used for years.
The nakshatra and its pada
The Moon's position also falls in one of 27 nakshatras of 13°20′, each divided into four padas of 3°20′. The nakshatra is finer than the rashi and carries more of the reading: it is what the Vimshottari dasha sequence starts from, what seven of the eight matching kootas are computed on, and what the traditional naming syllable is taken from.
The houses: where each of the nine grahas fell
Once the lagna is fixed, the twelve bhavas follow, and each of the nine grahas lands in one of them. A house is a department of life and a graha in it is what the tradition reads there, so almost every statement in a reading is really a statement about a graha, a house and a lord. This is also the part that an approximate birth time makes unusable.
02How do I make my kundli online for free?
Enter three things: your date of birth, your time of birth, and your place of birth. That is everything a chart needs: no name, no phone number, no account. The place matters because it fixes both the latitude that sets your lagna and the timezone your birth time is read in; pick your city from the list rather than typing it, so the zone we resolve is the one you expect. The report comes back immediately and we do not keep your birth details after it runs.
03What does a free kundli actually contain?
The rashi chart (D1) with every graha placed to the degree, minute and second, and its nakshatra and pada. The lagna and its lord. The Vimshottari dasha timeline with antardasha subdivision. The divisional charts, including the navamsa (D9). Shadbala for planetary strength and Ashtakavarga for sign strength. Yogas the chart forms, retrogression, combustion, and the upagrahas. The panchang of your birth day.
04Do I need my exact birth time for an accurate kundli?
For the lagna, yes. The ascendant moves about one degree every four minutes and changes sign roughly every two hours, and because it sets every house in the chart, an hour's error can shift the whole reading. The Moon is more forgiving but still moves (about half a degree an hour), so an uncertain time can leave the nakshatra ambiguous. If you know only the date, the graha positions by sign are still usable and so is much of the dasha; what you should not trust is anything read from houses.
05Is my rashi my Sun sign or my Moon sign?
Your Moon sign. In Jyotish the rashi is the sign the Moon occupied when you were born, and it is what rashifal, Sade Sati and kundali matching are all read from. The Sun sign that newspaper horoscopes use is a Western convention. This catches almost everyone out at least once: the Moon crosses a rashi in about two and a quarter days, so your birth time is what settles it, and it will very often not be the sign you have called yourself for years.
06Why is my Vedic rashi different from my Western zodiac sign?
Because the two systems measure from different starting points. Jyotish uses the nirayana or sidereal zodiac, fixed against the stars. Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, fixed to the spring equinox, which drifts against the stars by about a degree every 72 years. The gap between them is the ayanamsha, currently around 24 degrees, most of a sign, so placements routinely fall a whole rashi apart. Neither is a mistake; they are answering different questions about where a graha is.
07How accurate is an online kundli?
The positions here are computed from a modern planetary ephemeris to arc-second accuracy, which is far finer than any reading needs. What actually varies between sites is convention, not precision: which ayanamsha is applied, whether houses are whole-sign or cusp-based, and whether the lunar nodes are taken as mean or true. We use the Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) ayanamsha with whole-sign bhavas and say so on every report. Two careful calculators disagreeing usually means they made different choices, not that one is wrong.
08What is the difference between a kundli and a horoscope?
In Indian usage they are often the same word for the same thing: the birth chart. The confusion is that "horoscope" is also used in English for a daily sun-sign column, which is a different object entirely: a general forecast written for a twelfth of the population. A kundli is specific to one birth, one place and one minute, and nothing about it is shared with anyone born under the same Sun sign somewhere else.
09Can I read my own kundli?
The first pass is learnable. Find your lagna, then your Moon sign and nakshatra, then which mahadasha is running now. Those three already frame most of what a reading discusses. After that it gets genuinely difficult, because the meaning of a placement depends on the whole chart rather than on any single rule. We show every figure with the working that produced it so you can follow what is being claimed and check it; what we deliberately do not do is hand you a verdict.
