01Ephemeris and time
Positions come from Swiss Ephemeris — the ephemeris Astrodienst has maintained since 1997 and the de facto standard in astrology software. You can change the house system, tighten the orbs, and choose which bodies appear, and every chart is stamped with the settings it was computed under. Watching a setting change the answer is the fastest way to learn how any of this works.
- Zodiac
- Tropical is the default — 0° Aries is the vernal equinox point. Sidereal (Lahiri IAE-1985) is available in chart settings. Nakshatras and dashas are computed in the app under Other traditions · Vedic; vargas are not computed.
- Viewpoint
- Geocentric, apparent positions (light-time and aberration included).
- Timebase
- Planetary positions are computed in Ephemeris Time (ET); houses and the Ascendant in Universal Time (UT). ΔT comes from the ephemeris’s own table.
- Time zone
- Resolved from the historical zone table for the birth place and date, including known daylight-saving transitions — Turkey’s permanent UTC+3 since 2016 is in that table too.
- Precision
- Degree and arcminute are shown; seconds are computed internally but not displayed. A one-minute error in birth time moves the Ascendant by roughly a quarter of a degree — a standard astronomical approximation, not one of the engine’s own constants.
02Bodies
The engine defines twenty-two bodies and points; all of them are free on the natal chart — the extended layer is not behind a paywall (see pricing). Fourteen of them currently carry written interpretation; the rest still appear on the wheel and in the list with their degree — never hidden, never given an invented sentence.
The Ascendant and the midheaven are computed as chart angles rather than bodies, and only when the birth time is known. This engine does not compute a Vertex.
03House systems
Six house systems are available, and the choice is stamped under every chart. Systems divide the same sky differently — planets do not move, boundaries do.
Near the polar circle (roughly 66° latitude) a time-based system like Placidus can go undefined for part of the year. Swiss Ephemeris itself handles that case and falls back to Porphyry — Lizastro adds no special-case logic of its own here; the request goes straight to the ephemeris.
04Aspects and orb
An aspect counts when the gap between two bodies sits within its orb of the exact angle. Orbs can be tightened; narrowing one removes aspects rather than adding them. They are never widened — a wider orb would manufacture an aspect that is not there.
An aspect involving the Sun or the Moon gets a 25% wider orb than the table below — the traditional rule that luminaries carry more weight. (×1.25)
Each aspect is marked applying or separating — a fast body moving toward or away from the exact angle. Strength is a 0–1 scale: it rises as the orb tightens and as the average importance of the two bodies involved goes up. The reading engine writes about the strongest aspects first.
05Birth-time policy
When the time is unknown, the Sun and the slower-moving planets are computed assuming noon (local) at the birth place, and the chart says so. The Ascendant, midheaven, houses and house-based readings are not shown — an Ascendant produced from a noon guess is usually wrong, and this product does not present a wrong thing as certain.
The Moon moves roughly 13° a day, so the noon assumption is off from the real position by at most about 6.5° in the worst case — a birth at midnight. Where that puts the Moon close to a sign boundary, both possible signs are shown together.
Timezone records for your birthplace before 1970 are uncertain. Your rising sign may be off by a degree.
06The reading engine
The model never receives free text about you — no name, no message history, and no notes unless you turn that on in settings. What it receives is the structured output of your chart: body, degree, sign, house, aspect type, orb. The system prompt requires it to stay with that data, and lets it cite a degree or house number directly in the text; nothing outside the data is invented. Which contacts a reading rests on is not marked sentence by sentence — it is the list underneath the reading.
07Birth data and Circle
Your birth date, time and place are visible only to you. What a Circle room sees is only as much of the computed output as you allow — never the raw data — and each member sets their own level, defaulting to the most private.
The date, time and place you entered are never shown. The full-chart level shares degrees, Rising and houses, from which others can work out your birth time.
08Verification
The compatibility example on the landing page is a real computation, and its birth data is public — check it against another ephemeris if you like. Expect zero difference against other Swiss-Ephemeris-based software, and at most a few arcseconds against a genuinely different ephemeris. Every number on this site — including the live sky line in the header — comes from the same Swiss Ephemeris call; there is no separate, lighter preview calculation anywhere on the site.
If you find a discrepancy, tell us — a change to how something is computed would move this page’s version number and the footer of every chart at once.
09Timing: the When? rules
“When?” looks through the next 30 or 90 days for stretches that suit one of seven purposes, using rules from the traditional elections literature. It filters time; it does not predict what will happen. Every score, every reason on the page and every rule below comes from one table in the engine.
There are two kinds of rule. Sky rules read the sky alone: the Moon’s condition and retrograde planets. Natal rules read a transit against your own planets and angles, using the classical natures: Venus and Jupiter ease, Mars and Saturn press, and the Moon eases or presses by her aspect.
The authors cited ask that an election be fitted to the person’s birth chart. Reading that as transits to the planets that stand for the matter in your chart is a modern way of doing it; none of these works says it in those words.
The direction of each rule, helping or hindering, is traditional. The size of each weight is an editorial choice made for this product: whole numbers, with the Moon’s condition counting most. A weight is not a probability. Sources are named by work, not by page.
A day is offered as part of a window when its score reaches 1.5, and never when the Moon is void of course for half of it or more. A day is offered as one to avoid at -3 or lower. Neighbouring days merge, and a window is cut at 7 days. If no day reaches the bar, the page says so.
Without a birth time, the rules about the Ascendant, the Midheaven and the natal Moon are left out. The Ascendant and Midheaven rules are also left out where the time zone of the birth place is uncertain. The page says so when it happens.
The rules
10Numerology
Numerology is a separate tradition from the natal chart. It does arithmetic on a date and on letters. Nothing in it is measured in the sky, and the chart does not use it. It is behind its own switch and each result lists the steps that produced it.
Life path: month, day and year are each reduced to one digit and the three are added and reduced again. 11, 22 and 33 are kept wherever they appear. Authors differ. Some add every digit of the date at once, some reduce master numbers too. The page shows the other results beside ours when they differ.
Personal year is birth day plus birth month plus the calendar year, reduced. Personal month adds the calendar month to the personal year, and personal day adds the calendar day to the personal month. These three never keep master numbers. The calendar year turns on 1 January, and the date is read in the reader’s own time zone.
The Pythagorean square comes from the Russian-language tradition, not from Pythagoras. The date gives four working numbers and the square counts how often each digit appears. We write the day without a leading zero, drop the minus sign on the third working number for dates from 2000 on, and add no extra numbers. The leading-zero reading is shown as an alternative.
Letters take the values 1 to 9 by their place in the alphabet, repeating. Latin counts A to Z. The matrix of destiny is not used here. Y is a vowel only when no other vowel touches it, unless the reader chooses otherwise.
Turkish has two readings. The default reads letters with dots, cedillas and breves as their plain Latin letters. The other counts the 29 letters of the Turkish alphabet in order. There is no standard, so both are offered and the result says which one was used.
Russian counts the 33 letters in alphabetical order, with the letter yo as its own letter by default and an option to count it as ye. The hard and soft signs are counted as consonants.
The Chaldean system is a second, separate choice. Letters take fixed values from 1 to 8 (A I J Q Y 1, B K R 2, C G L S 3, D M T 4, E H N X 5, U V W 6, O Z 7, F P 8) and no letter is 9. The name number is the sum of every letter of the name, the birth number is the day of the month alone, and the destiny number is every digit of the full date added together; sources differ on the two date numbers. A total from 10 to 52 is a compound number and is shown before the single digit it reduces to. 11, 22 and 33 are compound numbers here, not master numbers. The classical table has no values for Turkish or Cyrillic letters: Turkish letters are read as the Latin letter they are written from, and Cyrillic letters as the Latin letters of a transliteration by sound, with the hard and soft signs counting 0. Both are rules chosen here, and the page lists them.
Numerology has no demonstrated predictive power, and this site does not present it as having any. The texts only say what the tradition associates with a number. Nothing the reader types is stored, sent or counted.
Numerology calculator: Pythagorean and Chaldean
11Tarot
Tarot is a separate tradition from astrology. It is a deck of 78 cards used as a prompt for reflection. Nothing in it is measured in the sky, and the chart does not use it. It is behind its own switch.
The card of the day is a fixed draw: it is computed from a number kept in the reader's browser, or from the account when signed in, and from the calendar date in the reader's own time zone, so it changes at local midnight. A spread is drawn fresh each time, without replacement, from the browser's cryptographic random generator. With reversals switched on, each card is also given an orientation: a fair coin from the same source, or, for the card of the day, a second value worked out from the same number and date.
Cards are drawn upright unless the reader switches on reversals, a choice remembered on that device only. The text of a reversed card says what the tradition associates with it the other way up. The texts say what the tradition associates with a card, in original wording, and end in a question. The tool and the card pages carry the same notice that the draw is random and predicts nothing.
The planet and sign shown for a card follow the Golden Dawn attributions: the Major Arcana to planets, signs and elements, and the numbered cards of the suits to the thirds of the zodiac. Court cards have none. The page shows where that planet or sign is in the reader's chart beside it. It is a traditional correspondence, not an interpretation, and no link between the two is claimed.
Tarot has no demonstrated predictive power, and this site does not present it as having any. Nothing about the draw is sent or counted, and no card is given to the reading engine. The only things stored in the browser are the random number for the card of the day and the reader’s choice about reversals.