Janam Kundli — Your Full Birth Chart

The map of the sky at the moment and place you were born: the ascendant rising on the eastern horizon, the twelve houses that follow from it, and where the nine grahas stood. Everything an astrologer reads is built on those positions.

The moon takes about a day to cross a nakshatra, but the ascendant crosses a whole sign in roughly two hours. Without a time, the ascendant and therefore every house placement is a guess. With no time given, this page assumes noon and says plainly that only the moon sign and nakshatra are worth relying on.

A 120-year cycle of planetary periods, and what an astrologer actually consults when asked when something will happen. It starts from where the moon sat within its nakshatra at birth, so the first period is a partial one. Calculators that start everyone at the beginning of a period put every later date out by years.

They are not planets but the two points where the moon's path crosses the sun's, and those points always move backwards through the zodiac. It is not an error in the chart. They are also always exactly opposite each other, which is why their degrees match.

Whole sign, which is what the North Indian tradition uses: the sign holding the ascendant is the entire first house, the next sign the second, and so on. Quadrant systems such as Placidus put planets in different houses and would disagree with your family astrologer.

No, deliberately. A chart is a set of positions and what they mean is a conversation with somebody qualified. Any free calculator that hands you a prediction and then sells you a gemstone has told you what it is for.