The chart comes first.
Your birth chart is computed before your personalized interpretation is generated. We preserve the inputs, calculation conventions, and chart results with your reading.
Time and place matter.
Enter your Gregorian birth date and the local time recorded where you were born. We use the city's IANA time zone, including historical daylight saving rules, to convert it to UTC. Nonexistent times are rejected. If a clock change repeated a time, you must specify which occurrence applies.
The directory uses GeoNames city-center coordinates. These are not hospital-level coordinates. Even a very precise ephemeris cannot correct an uncertain birth time or location; historical civil-time records, especially before 1970, can also be incomplete. Births close to a sign, house, solar-term, or hour boundary deserve extra scrutiny.
Vedic astrology
Swiss Ephemeris calculates sidereal positions with the Lahiri ayanamsha. We use Whole Sign houses, true lunar nodes, nakshatras, padas, and calculated Navamsa signs. Vimshottari periods start from the Moon's precise position in its nakshatra. Period calculations use a 365.25-day year; other schools may use a different year length.
Chinese BaZi
The year begins at Li Chun, when the apparent geocentric Sun reaches 315° longitude. Months change at the twelve Jie solar terms, not on the first day of Gregorian or lunar months. Those instants come from Swiss Ephemeris.
Day and hour pillars use local apparent solar time: longitude correction plus the equation of time. Our day changes at midnight in apparent solar time, and the hour stem follows that same day stem. Some schools change the day at 11 p.m.; that convention can produce a different chart.
Traditional luck-cycle direction follows the selected male/female convention and the yin/yang polarity of the birth-year stem. We state the elapsed-time rule used to derive cycle onset. Interpretive five-element scores are symbolic rubrics, not physical measurements.
Western astrology
We use tropical, geocentric planetary positions and Placidus houses, with retrograde motion and computed aspect orbs. Where Placidus is undefined at high latitudes, the chart explicitly uses Whole Sign houses instead. We never silently treat the fallback as Placidus.
Calculation precision is not predictive proof.
Swiss Ephemeris uses its bundled planetary and lunar ephemeris files; our calculation layer rejects a silent switch to the lower-precision Moshier fallback. This improves reproducibility of astronomical inputs. It does not establish the scientific validity of astrological predictions.
Reports are generated automatically from your calculated charts and traditional interpretive frameworks. Interpretations may contain mistakes. Reports are for entertainment and self-reflection, not medical, financial, or legal advice.
Open source
My Fortune Atlas is provided under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. You can download the corresponding source code and read the license. User data and credentials are never included. See the source notices for third-party components.