A portrait of the sky at the exact minute you were born

This is a picture of the actual sky at the exact minute someone was born — calculated with precision.

Starlit Portraits makes personalised birth chart prints using Vedic astrology (Jyotish) — the astronomical and mathematical system developed in India over 2,000 years ago. Each print shows the real positions of the Sun, the Moon and the planets, worked out for one date, one time and one place.

Most personalised star maps are a rendering of a night sky, chosen to look right. This is a chart. It is drawn from the same figures an astronomer would use, and it arrives with a guide that explains how to read it.

What you receive

Every order includes:

• the chart itself, as a print or as a high-resolution digital file
• a companion guide explaining how to read it

The guide is the part that matters. A chart nobody can read is a decoration; a chart that arrives with the explanation is a record you can actually use.

The four colourways

Four colourways: Celestial, Botanical, Coastal and Supernova. The chart itself is identical in each — only the palette and the border change.

• Celestial
• Botanical
• Coastal
• Supernova

If you do not know your birth time

If you do not know the time you were born, there are two places to look before giving up on it.

The paperwork. Some birth certificates record the time and some do not, depending on where and when you were born, so it is worth checking rather than assuming either way. Where the certificate does not have it, hospital notes, a red book or a baby book often do.

Whoever was there. A parent's memory is more useful than people expect, and it does not have to be exact to be worth having. "Some time in the morning" already rules out most of the day. "Early morning" or "early afternoon" narrows it much further, and that is often enough to work with — tell me what you have and I will tell you plainly how much of the chart it settles and how much it leaves open.

If there is no time at all, the chart can be read from the Moon instead of the rising sign — the Moon chart, or Chandra Lagna.

It is not a lesser version of the other one. A chart cast on the birth time is the outer view: how someone meets the world, and how the world tends to read them back. A Moon chart is the inner one: how they take the world in, what they notice first, how they feel their way through it. It answers a different question, and for plenty of people it is the more useful of the two.

What it cannot do is timing, which depends on the rising sign. So a Moon reading describes, and says plainly what cannot be known without the minute.

Reading your chart

If you already have a print, the guide explains every element on it. If you do not, it shows you what you would be looking at.

How to read your chart