Important Notes, FAQs & Troubleshooting for the free astrology chart maker

Saving Your Chart

  • Your free birth chart will be displayed on screen only. On most browsers you can print the web page that is displayed on your screen, or save it on your hard drive, usually by selecting ‘file’ and then ‘save page’ and selecting ‘webpage, complete’ as the file type.

Problems with the Place

  • The coordinates and time zone of your place and time of birth will be looked up in an extensive 250,000 place worldwide atlas. If the place cannot be found it is most likely due to incorrect spelling, or some other mistaken entry. If the place cannot be found you will be prompted for more information.
  • Don’t enter any province, county, or state names for countries outside of the USA. Just enter: place, country
  • USSR, Yugoslavia, and other former Eastern bloc country names will not be found. Please use the most current country names. See the country list.
  • If there are multiple towns in your country or US state that have the same name, we suggest you substitute a different town nearby which has a unique name. Otherwise the web page will choose whichever town is found first in its database. This free web page is currently limited in that area, although our windows software has no such limitations.

Problems with the Time or Date

  • Please enter the date in this format: Month/Date/Year (example: 9/24/2009)
  • The correct time is important for determining your houses, rising sign, and exact moon position. Please try to be as accurate as possible. If you don’t know the time, the Rising Sign and possibly Moon sign might be inaccurate. Any planets at the border of a sign (cusp) may also be inaccurate.
  • Please enter the legal time of day at the time of birth. Our database has a record of all time zones throughout history, including daylight time, war time, etc. These time zones will be compensated for automatically.

Questions about Your Chart

Our software uses the most accurate data available anywhere for places and changes in time zones throughout history. The rising sign changes every two hours. Your time must be accurate to get the proper rising sign. In many cases people are given incorrect rising signs when the astrologer or software program calculates the time zone incorrectly. There are many loopholes in the time zone laws, daylight savings time rules were not even standardized until 1966. Our programmers have been dealing with this issue for 20+ years. Provided you have entered your location and date and time correctly and your town was found in our database then you can trust this astro chart as being accurate.

There are many different methods of calculating the house cusps (border lines). No method is more ‘correct’ than the other methods and the results vary slightly from one method to the next. There is no debate about the position of the planets, the planets are where they are. Houses, however, are synthetic points in the sky created by astrologers and there is much debate among astrologers as to how these houses should be arranged, particularly the 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11 & 12th house cusps.

This free astrology birth chart program uses the Placidus method of calculating astrological houses which is the most popular world wide. Many American astrologers prefer the Koch house system, and there are at least 30 other systems. The house position of most planets will not vary from one house system to another, but sometimes if a planet is close to the border of a house it can change house positions from one house system to the next. In cases like this, it might be helpful to think of that planet as being ‘cuspal’ as far as the house is concerned and it may be that both different house interpretations have some meaning for you. That particular planet in question may also help you determine which house system works best for you personally. On the other hand, when there is a doubt, some astrologers will ‘promote’ that planet to the higher numbered of the two houses in question.

House cusps are not listed or interpreted in the text of this free report. The lines for the house cusps are, however, printed on the free birth chart wheel graphic included with your report. If you would like more detailed information about your houses, get our professional natal report, or an in-depth birth chart analysis with Maria.