KP Astrology Calculator

Open your KP chart and the cusp table shows a degree against every house — 10°26′ Leo for the 1st, 6°45′ Virgo for the 2nd, and so on. Those degrees are not decoration. They are the points where one house ends and the next begins, and they come from the Placidus method, which divides the time the ascendant degree takes to climb to the midheaven rather than dividing the zodiac into equal slices.

Two things follow, and both surprise a reader used to whole-sign charts. First, a house can hold parts of two signs, so a planet may sit in the 2nd house by cusp while occupying the sign of the 3rd. KP reads it in the 2nd. The chart you get here marks such planets, because this is the commonest reason a KP reading and a kundli reading disagree about where a planet sits. Second, at high latitudes the houses stretch badly — a reader in northern Europe or Canada will see one house cover sixty degrees and another barely fifteen. That is the method working as intended, not an error.

This is also why KP asks for the birth place to the city rather than the state. The cusps depend on latitude, and a few hundred kilometres north moves them by more than the width of a sub.

The zodiac holds 27 nakshatras of 13°20′ each. KP cuts every nakshatra into nine subs, one for each planet, and — this is the point people miss — the subs are not equal. Each takes the share its planet holds in the 120 years of the Vimshottari dasha. Venus, with 20 years, takes the widest sub; the Sun, with 6, takes one of the narrowest. Run the arithmetic across all 27 nakshatras and the zodiac ends up divided into 249 unequal parts, each belonging to one sign, one star lord and one sub lord.

That number is why horary in KP asks for a figure between 1 and 249: each number stands for one of those divisions, and it supplies the ascendant for the question chart. It is also why a KP reading can change with a two-minute correction in the birth time. The narrowest subs are under half a degree wide, and the ascendant crosses half a degree in about two minutes.

Once a cusp has allowed a matter, KP asks which planets can deliver it. A planet signifies a house in four ways, and they are ranked: it is in the star of a planet occupying that house; it occupies the house itself; it is in the star of the house's lord; it is the lord of the house. Occupancy through a star lord outranks plain lordship, because a planet gives the results of its star lord first. Your significator tables print all of this, graded, both house by house and planet by planet.

The ruling planets are a second, faster instrument. Taken at the moment of judgement, they are the day lord, the sign and star lord of the Moon, and the sign and star lord of the ascendant. They are used to confirm: when the planets ruling the moment repeat the significators of the matter, the indication is treated as firm, and a period belonging to those planets is where the astrologer looks for the event. Krishnamurti called them the key to accurate timing, and in horary they carry most of the weight.

KP works on its own ayanamsa. The Krishnamurti value — KP Old in this calculator — is the standard, and a section of practitioners uses the revised KP New. The gap between them is a few minutes of arc, which sounds like nothing until you remember that the narrowest sub is under half a degree wide. A cusp sitting near the edge of a sub can change its sub lord between the two, and with it the answer to whether a matter is promised.

Astromitra keeps the two systems apart on purpose. Your Vedic charts stay on whichever ayanamsa you chose for them — Lahiri by default — and your KP charts run on their own, KP Old by default. Changing one never disturbs the other, and both are picked from the same list of more than forty ayanamsas in Chart Settings.

Birth time deserves the same care. The ascendant moves roughly one degree every four minutes, so the sub lord of the 1st cusp can change inside a five-minute error and the sub-sub lord inside seconds. If your time comes from memory rather than a record, treat the fast-moving cusps as provisional. The KP pane lets you nudge the birth time by a second, ten seconds or a minute and watch the cusps move, which is the first step of rectification: you adjust until the chart matches events that have already happened.

KP is at its strongest on questions with a yes or a no behind them, and at its weakest on questions about character. Will this marriage happen. Will the job come through. Will the property sale complete. Will the case go my way. Each of those belongs to a cusp, and the cusp's sub lord answers without hedging.

For the shape of a person — temperament, strengths, the way a life unfolds — a Parashari reading of the whole chart says far more. And for a question asked without a birth chart at all, KP offers horary: a number between 1 and 249, the moment the question is asked, and a chart cast from those alone.