What a kundli (birth chart) actually is
A kundli places the sign rising on the eastern horizon at the moment of birth — the Lagna, or ascendant — as the first house, then arranges the remaining eleven houses counter-clockwise from it, with the nine planets plotted onto that frame. Think of the Lagna as the compass rose on a map: it decides which way the whole chart faces. Two people born on the same day in different places or at different times end up with different ascendants, and therefore a differently-oriented chart even when the planets themselves are in nearly the same signs.
The other essential piece is that Jyotish uses the sidereal zodiac, anchored to the actual fixed stars, rather than the tropical zodiac most Western astrology uses, which is anchored to the equinox. Precession has opened a gap of roughly 24 degrees between the two — the ayanamsha. This tool uses the Lahiri ayanamsha, the standard also used in India's official civil calendar. If your Sun sign here differs by one sign from a Western horoscope, that's the two zodiacs disagreeing about where zero degrees is, not a calculation error.
North Indian or South Indian format — which to read
The two formats show the same calculation, drawn two different ways — there's no difference in content. In the North Indian (diamond) layout, the houses are fixed in the drawing, with the first house always at the top centre; the signs move from house to house depending on the ascendant. The South Indian (square) layout does the reverse: the signs are fixed in their grid cells, and the ascendant is marked wherever it happens to fall.
The practical difference is mostly how quickly your eye adjusts. Because the signs sit in the same cells for everyone in the South Indian format, some people find it easier to compare several charts side by side. The North Indian format trains you to read around your own ascendant, and is traditionally dominant in northern and western India. Whichever you learn first, the other is just a rearrangement of the same data, and reads quickly once that clicks.
What the planetary details add
The diagram alone doesn't show each planet's exact degree, which nakshatra it occupies, or whether it's retrograde. The details tab gives all three as numbers. Dignity in particular — exalted, debilitated, own sign, or neutral — matters: “Venus in the seventh house” reads very differently depending on whether that Venus is exalted (in Pisces) or debilitated (in Virgo), and the classical tradition treats those as materially different placements, not a footnote.
Nakshatras are a finer division than signs — roughly 2.25 nakshatras fit inside each sign — and add a shade of colour to how a planet operates. Pada (1 through 4) divides each nakshatra into quarters again, a finer adjustment still. Retrograde describes a planet appearing to move backward from Earth's vantage point, and is classically read as that planet's themes turning inward rather than outward.
What this chart alone can and cannot tell you
The birth chart is a single still photograph. It captures the sky at the moment of birth precisely, but on its own it says nothing about when anything happens. That's the job of the Vimshottari dasha (planetary periods) and gochar (transits — the current sky overlaid on this same chart). Two people with near-identical charts can be living through the same placement very differently, depending on which dasha they're currently in.
The chart also isn't a verdict on its own. A placement like Mangal Dosha can be offset by other factors, and this site's own yoga/dosha check only mechanically verifies some of the classical cancellation conditions, not the full set. Learning to read a chart and getting a professional judgment on a specific question are two different things.
- The birth chart fixes the planetary positions at the moment of birth
- Reading timing requires the dasha periods and current transits together
- Whether a specific placement is favourable depends on its relationship to other factors, not on the placement alone