What is a kundli?
A kundli (birth chart) is a map of the sky at the moment and place you were born — twelve houses, nine grahas, computed from real astronomy.
2-minute read · plain language
The snapshot
At your birth instant, every planet stood at an exact point in the zodiac. A kundli fixes that snapshot: the ascendant (lagna) — the sign rising on the eastern horizon at your birthplace — becomes the 1st house, and the rest of the sky is read as twelve houses from it.
What's in it
Nine grahas (Sun through Saturn, plus the lunar nodes Rāhu and Ketu) sit in the twelve signs and houses. Everything else in Jyotiṣa — daśās, yogas, strength calculations — is derived from these positions.
Sidereal, not Western
Indian kundlis use the sidereal zodiac, anchored to the stars, which sits about 24° behind the Western tropical zodiac. That is why your 'Vedic sign' can differ from your magazine sun sign — same sky, different reference point.
The honest part
A kundli is a computed astronomical fact — the positions are checkable to the arc-second. What those positions MEAN is interpretation, and honest astrology keeps the two separate: computation shown openly, meaning offered with its classical source.
Common questions
Do I need my exact birth time?
Yes, ideally to the minute — the ascendant changes sign roughly every two hours, and the houses shift with it. An uncertain time mainly blurs house placements; planet-in-sign positions change slowly.
Can two apps give different kundlis?
The planets should match almost exactly. Differences usually trace to the ayanāṁśa convention or the house system — both are named settings, not mysteries.
Where do these fall in your chart? AstroAmrit maps every sky event onto your own birth chart — which house it touches, which of your planets it meets — with every claim cited to the computation behind it.
See these in your chart →How this table was computed
AstroAmrit is a glass box: every number on this page is reproducible from the stated method. These are astronomical facts, not predictions. Times are instants of the event's global maximum or exact crossing; your local civil date can differ by one day depending on timezone.