ONE QUESTION · A WORKED CHART
How do I find my lagna?
A birthday can identify a Sun-sign range; it cannot tell you your lagna, or rising sign. To find the sign rising on the eastern horizon at birth, use your date, recorded time and birth place in a Vedic chart calculation, then look for Lagna, Ascendant or Asc in the result. Check the zodiac reference setting too; the worked example here uses Lahiri.
Enter morning or evening correctly and use the recorded local time. The calculation must account for the place's time zone. If the time is unknown, entering noon creates a noon chart; it does not recover the missing time. In a North Indian chart drawing, the numbers identify signs. The number 10 means Capricorn, rather than automatically meaning the tenth house.
See it in a chart
Example birth: 15 January 1990, 08:30 IST · New Delhi
For the fictional Delhi birth on 15 January 1990 at 08:30 IST, using Delhi's coordinates, 28.6139° N and 77.2090° E, the example's Lahiri ascendant is 291.097090°. Capricorn spans 270°–300°, so the result is Capricorn 21.097090°. Under whole-sign houses, Capricorn becomes house one, containing the Sun, Venus and Rahu. Capricorn's ruler Saturn is in Sagittarius, house twelve, with Mercury. Finding the rising sign establishes the house layout and identifies its ruler, whose placement is the next detail to examine.
- Recorded local time
- 15 January 1990, 08:30 IST (UTC+05:30)
- Ascendant longitude
- 291.097090°
- Lagna
- Capricorn 21.097090°
For your own chart
Find the Asc marker before interpreting the chart's numbers. Save the recorded date, time, place and calculation settings alongside the result. If the birth time is approximate, calculate the plausible range and see whether the rising sign stays the same.
The ascendant degree describes the horizon, not a planet's position. Do not treat a rising sign calculated from a guessed time as settled.
For astrologers: calculation details
Fictional Demo Chart A · 15 January 1990, 08:30 IST (UTC+05:30)
New Delhi, India; 28.6139° N, 77.2090° E
Lahiri sidereal zodiac; mean nodes; whole-sign houses; geocentric geometric positions; Vimshottari with a 365.25636-day year. UTC birth instant: 1990-01-15T03:00:00Z. Reference instant: 2026-09-28T06:30:00Z.
Angles are rounded to six decimal places; arithmetic uses the saved full values. Period boundaries are displayed to the nearest second in IST. These settings describe the calculation, not the precision of a birth record.
Follow the calculation
- For this Delhi example, subtract 5 hours 30 minutes from 08:30 IST. That gives 03:00 UTC on 15 January 1990.
- Calculate the eastern horizon for 28.6139° N, 77.2090° E at that instant, with the Lahiri sidereal reference. The resulting longitude is 291.097090°.
- Capricorn spans 270°–300°. Subtract its 270° start to get 21.097090° within Capricorn. This is the lagna's degree, not a planet's position.