The Jyotish Studio offers a fine array of truly lovely Vedic charts, some with carefully
designed beautiful backgrounds making them suitable for wall hanging. It also has the largest
collection of famous peoples’ charts (for a Vedic program). You can view and print very useful
sorted listings (with many choices of sorts) of the charts in the database, a compact listing of
everyone’s data and planetary placements, and even compare any chart for similarities with all
of the other charts in the database.
The program is packed with a huge variety of nice touches. For example, you can easily
rotate any chart to show any sign as lagna. One powerful table shows both the exact degrees for
planets in each of the vargas, and a well-thought-out table showing the conjunctions of plan-
ets in divisional charts with rasi points. You can also create a listing of planetary stationary
times, tertiary progressed stations, kakshas, and custom designed listings of exactly the infor-
mation you want, from a huge list of attributes.
Käla.This program (by Jyotish Academy International) is the newest professional-level
Vedic program to be released. As such, it is being enhanced at a rapid rate and many new fea-
tures—including a Muhurta screen—are likely to be added soon. Käla has a 10,800-year
ephemeris range, a very simple-to-learn user interface, the ability to open any number of addi-
tional charts and tables at once, and classical text delineations for marriage and sexuality,
mental illness, transits, illness and accidents, and dasas.
Käla is most immediately noteworthy because of the quality of its modern interpretations.
Its core yoga delineations are impressively thorough and very well written, and its in-depth
analysis of planets in combustion, debilitation, and the nodes, as well as the ruler of each house,
are very good. Käla also offers very comprehensive information on Vedic compatibility factors.
One of the most valuable features of Käla is its carefully designed screens for specific
functions. Its Compatibility screen shows a bi-wheel or composite chart, kuta analysis for all of
the planets, tajika aspects between the charts, and more. The Transit screen also shows an ani-
mated bi-wheel, with aspect lines drawn in (if they’re in the same navamsa portion), as well as
valuable animated tables.
Käla’s Varshaphala screen is also carefully designed for greatest applicability and includes
Mudda, Patyayini, and one-year Vimshottari dasa listings, sahams, three types of Varshaphal
strengths, and much more. The Prashna screen allows you to select the Prashna and the Arud-
ha, offering several prashna techniques and the pertinent yogas (from 12 classical Vedic texts).Software Limitations
For all of the power and accuracy of today’s astrological software, there are still sources
of errors. Data entry is of course the primary cause of incorrect charts. Older time-change
atlases and incorrect birth times are also common sources of error. A more in-depth look at
software limitations can be found at http://www.soulhealing.com/optimal.htm. Many astrology
programs have incredible versatility and power, and are built by programmers committed to
advancing the field every year. Future programs will be able to help astrologers combine pre-
dictive techniques even more effectively and weight factors in relationship to each other. Per-
haps they will even achieve chart synthesis.THEASTROLOGYBOOK [869]Appendix D: Astrological SoftwareAstrology BM.qxp 12/22/08 12:18 PM Page 869