Rising sign calculator

Your rising sign, or ascendant, is the zodiac sign that was coming up over the eastern horizon at the moment and place you were born. In Vedic astrology it's the lagna, and it sets the first house of the birth chart.

All twelve signs rise over the course of a day, so the ascendant changes sign about every two hours, faster for some signs than others. If you were born near a change, twenty minutes can make the difference. Use the time on your birth certificate if you have it.

The rising sign depends on where you were on Earth: the latitude sets how the zodiac meets the horizon and the longitude sets the local time. The place also gives the time zone rules that applied on your birth date.

Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac and Vedic astrology the sidereal one, currently about 24° apart. So your lagna is often the sign before your Western rising sign. We use the Lahiri ayanamsa, the standard in India.

We use the standard ascendant formula with sidereal time from astronomy-engine, tested against the Sun's position at sunrise to within a few hundredths of a degree. The limit is your birth time. It isn't calculated for births above the polar circles, where the formula breaks down.