Entering Your Birth Place: Three Ways, and Why the Time Zone Decides Your Houses
The birth place field does more work than any other part of the form. It sets your coordinates, which decide where the houses fall, and it attaches a time zone, which decides what moment the whole chart is calculated for. Get it wrong and every planet is in the right sign and the wrong house.
There are three ways to enter it, and they behave differently. This explains what each one does, why your city sometimes looks like it is missing when it is not, and how to check afterwards that the chart used what you meant.
Why it matters more than people expect
Your birth time is a local clock reading. The ephemeris works in Universal Time, so the calculation subtracts your offset to convert one into the other, and every position comes out of that converted moment.
The planets barely notice an hour of error. The Moon moves about half a degree, the Sun about two and a half arcminutes, and everything slower is unchanged for practical purposes. The angles are the problem. The Ascendant and Midheaven move roughly one degree every four minutes, so an hour shifts them about fifteen degrees. That is enough to change your rising sign and move most of your planets into different houses.
The coordinates matter too, though less dramatically. A city a hundred kilometres away moves the Ascendant by a fraction of a degree. A city on the wrong side of a time zone boundary moves it by fifteen.
Route one: the city dropdown
Start typing in the City of Birth field and suggestions appear after three characters. Click the one you want.
This is the step people skip. Typing a city name and moving straight on to the next field attaches nothing. The lookup runs only when you select a suggestion. Until you do, the chart has no coordinates and no zone, and it will be calculated at an offset of zero.
Two things about how the list is built are worth knowing, because they explain almost every "my city is not there" message we get.
It matches anywhere in the name, and sorts alphabetically. Type Azov and the first two results are Alegazovo and Almazovo, because both contain the letters you typed and both sort earlier. Azov is the third entry, not the first. Type Springfield and eleven variations of East Springfield arrive before any plain Springfield does.
The match runs against the city and the country together. So adding the country narrows it sharply. Azov returns a list you have to read through. Azov Russia returns two results with Azov at the top.
Accents are stripped before searching, so you can type Ben Tre and find Bến Tre without reaching for a Vietnamese keyboard. Do read the country on the line you pick, though. Ben Tre returns the one in Cuba before the one in Vietnam.
Route two: accessible city entry
The first link under the city field, labelled "Can't use the city dropdown?", switches to a plain text box with a Find location button. Type the city, press the button, and a status line reports what it found and which time zone it attached.
The name undersells it. This route searches a different and much larger place database than the dropdown does, so it is the one to try when your birthplace genuinely is not in the list. Small towns, villages, and places whose English spelling differs from the local one are the usual cases. Adding the country still helps, as in "Azov, Russia".
Every step is announced in text, so it also works properly with a screen reader, which is where the name comes from. The choice is remembered on your device and stays in effect on every entry page, including the two-step flow for relationship reports, until you use the "Go back to city dropdown" link.
Route three: the map, or typing it yourself
The second link, "Can't find your city in the list?", opens a map along with four extra fields: Birth Country, Birth Time Zone, Birth Latitude and Birth Longitude. You can use any part of this, and whatever you do last is what the form keeps.
Clicking the map
Click anywhere on the map and a marker drops with the coordinates on it. A panel appears above the map showing exactly what was captured, and all four fields fill in behind the scenes. Clicking central Melbourne gives latitude −37.98412194168221, longitude 144.95361328125003 and the zone Australia/Melbourne, with the country set to Australia at the same time.
This is the most precise route available, since the marker can sit on a specific hospital or suburb and not just a city centre. Zoom in before clicking and you can place it within a street.
The search icon in the map's top right corner does the same from a name, which is useful when you know the place but not where it sits on the map.
Setting the zone yourself
The Birth Time Zone list holds four hundred and twenty entries, which is unusable as a flat list. Fill in Birth Country first and it shrinks to just that country's zones.
| Birth Country | Zones left in the list |
|---|---|
| (blank) | 420 |
| Russia | 26 |
| Canada | 24 |
| Australia | 12 |
| Vietnam | 1 |
| Puerto Rico | 1 |
Most countries have exactly one zone, so for the majority of people this step turns four hundred choices into a single obvious one.
Finding your latitude and longitude
If you would rather type the coordinates, Google Maps will give them to you. Open Google Maps on a computer, right-click the exact spot, and the pop-up shows the latitude and longitude in decimal form at the top. Click those numbers to copy them. Google documents the steps, including the mobile versions, on its own Search by latitude and longitude help page.
Paste them into Birth Latitude and Birth Longitude in that order. Use decimal degrees, as in 18.4655 and −66.1057, and keep the minus sign, since it carries south latitude and west longitude. A number entered without its minus places you in the wrong hemisphere.
Setting coordinates by hand does not set the zone, so pick that from the dropdown as well.
Why the abbreviation you know is not enough
Most people know their zone by its initials. Several sets of initials mean more than one thing.
| Abbreviation | Could mean | Offset |
|---|---|---|
| AST | Atlantic Standard Time | UTC −4 |
| Arabia Standard Time | UTC +3 | |
| IST | India Standard Time | UTC +5:30 |
| Irish Standard Time | UTC +1 | |
| Israel Standard Time | UTC +2 | |
| CST | Central Standard Time, North America | UTC −6 |
| China Standard Time | UTC +8 | |
| BST | British Summer Time | UTC +1 |
| Bangladesh Standard Time | UTC +6 |
AST and CST sit seven and fourteen hours apart depending which one was meant. For the Atlantic zone the usual names are America/Puerto_Rico, America/Halifax, America/Barbados, America/Santo_Domingo, America/Port_of_Spain and Atlantic/Bermuda.
Three births where the obvious offset is wrong
A zone name carries its own history. An offset is a number, and numbers do not know what year you were born.
Liverpool, 9 October 1940. Britain is UTC+0 in October, so the obvious answer is no adjustment. It is wrong. Britain stayed on British Summer Time right through the war without putting the clocks back, so that birth converts at UTC+1.
Bến Tre, 18 February 1958. Vietnam today is UTC+7, which happens to be correct for 1958. It would not be correct for a birth two years later. Southern Vietnam ran +7 from July 1955, moved to +8 at the end of 1959, and returned to +7 in 1975.
Melbourne, 31 December 1971. Victoria is UTC+10 and does observe daylight saving, so a summer birth looks like +11. That is right for 1971 and would have been wrong for 1970. Australia had dropped daylight saving after the First World War and only brought it back for the 1971 to 1972 summer.
This is why the site stores a zone name and not a number. The conversion uses that name together with your birth date, so the rules actually in force that year are applied for you. It is also why the dropdown shows no offset beside each zone: the only offset it could show is today's, which for a January birth in a daylight-saving country is the wrong one.
Checking that it worked
Open any report built on the chart and read the header line under the title. It prints the date, the time, the place and the offset used. Three things are worth a look.
If the offset reads +0 and you were not born in Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Iceland or West Africa, no location was ever attached. Go back and select the city properly.
If the place is not your birthplace, a different city was matched. Within a hundred kilometres this barely moves anything. Across a zone boundary it moves everything.
If the offset is an hour from what you expected, check the daylight saving rule for that country in that year before assuming the chart is wrong. All three examples above are cases where the surprising number is the correct one.
Saved charts cannot be edited, so a correction means entering the birth data again and deleting the old one.
Births before standard time
Standard time zones are a railway invention. Britain adopted them in the 1840s, most of Europe and North America between the 1880s and 1900s, and some countries considerably later. Before that each town kept local mean time, set by the sun over that town.
For a birth before your country adopted standard time, the zone resolves to local mean time for those coordinates. The adjustment is usually under half an hour in Europe and larger in countries that span a wide longitude. It is one more reason to set the place by selecting a real location, since local mean time depends on the exact longitude and cannot be derived from a round offset.
Related guides
- Finding or rectifying a birth time, for when the clock reading itself is missing or doubtful.
- Choosing your chart settings, which covers the other inputs that change what a report says.
