Everything here is global. There is no per-profile override — change a zodiac frame, an aspect orb, or which bodies show, and it applies the next time you open any chart for any profile, not just the one you were looking at when you changed it. Four separate control surfaces cover the astronomical engine: the Calculation dialog for zodiac and ayanamsha, a badge on the chart toolbar itself for house system, the Aspects dialog for orbs and colors, and the Planetary Bodies dialog for which points appear on the wheel at all.
Opening it
All four live under the Settings menu, identically on the Dashboard and the Expanded Chart View: Settings → Calculation…, Settings → Aspects, and Settings → Planetary Bodies…. The house system picker is the one exception — it isn't a Settings menu item at all, it's a small pill on the chart toolbar itself (see below).
Zodiac and ayanamsha
The Calculation dialog opens on a Zodiac & Ephemeris tab with two combo boxes. Default zodiac system offers Tropical, Sidereal and Draconic — Draconic is visible but grayed out, reserved for a future build. Default ayanamsha only enables once Sidereal is selected, and lists five working values — Lahiri, Fagan/Bradley, Raman, Krishnamurti (KP) and True Citra — alongside three more (Sri Yukteshwar, Galactic Center, Custom Value) that appear in the list but are grayed out the same way Draconic is.
Zodiac & Ephemeris tab — Sidereal selected, unlocking the ayanamsha combo below it.
A third control on this same tab — Lunar node (Rahu / Ketu) — is a live True Node / Mean Node switch: classical Vedic technique uses the Mean node, while the True node tracks the Moon's real oscillating motion. It only matters in Sidereal mode; Western tropical charts always use the True node regardless of this setting. The dialog's left rail lists four more category tabs — Planets & Nodes, Houses & Space, Traditional Rules, Progression & Rates — but only the node switch above is actually wired up; the rest are visual previews of settings that haven't shipped yet, and the dialog's own footer says as much.
House system
Despite the grayed-out combo inside the Calculation dialog, house system doesn't live there at all — it's a small pill badge on the chart toolbar, labelled with whichever system is currently active (for example Placidus), present on both the Dashboard and the Expanded Chart View. Clicking it opens a flyout of every supported system, grouped the same way the flyout itself groups them:
- Quadrant systems — Placidus, Koch, Regiomontanus, Campanus, Porphyry, Alcabitius, Topocentric
- Equal & sign-based systems — Whole Sign, Equal (Asc), Equal (MC), Vehlow, Aries (0° Aries)
- Equatorial & time-proportional — Meridian, Morinus
- Advanced / research — Krusinski, APC, Horizontal, Sunshine, Gauquelin Sectors, Carter (Polyconic), Sine
- Eastern / Vedic — Sri Pati
- Origin-shifted, derived — Solar, Lunar, Draconic, Part of Fortune, Vertex, and a Planetary submenu that lets you choose which body anchors the first house
That's 28 systems in total. Free accounts can select Placidus and Whole Sign; every other entry in the flyout prompts an upgrade the moment you pick it. Switch the app into Sidereal mode and the flyout itself narrows to just four Vedic-appropriate systems — Whole Sign, Sri Pati, Placidus (KP) and Equal — with everything else grayed out and a tooltip explaining why.
- 1Active system — Placidus checked; everything else in this Quadrant Systems group prompts an upgrade on Free.
Aspects
Settings → Aspects opens a dialog listing all 23 aspects AstroWatch can plot, organised into four sections: Major Aspects (Conjunction, Opposition, Trine, Square, Sextile), Minor Aspects (Quincunx, Semi-Square, Sesquiquadrate, Semi-Sextile, Quintile, Bi-Quintile, Septile, Novile), Harmonic & Septenary (Decile, Tredecile, Quindecile, Bi-Septile, Tri-Septile, Bi-Novile, Vigintile, Undecile), and Declination Aspects (Parallel, Contra-Parallel). Every row carries its own color swatch, an on/off toggle, and separate orb fields for natal and transit use.
Open Settings → Aspects
Search the list or browse by section — a density toggle switches between a Compact and a Comfortable row layout.
Pick a color
Each aspect draws from curated palettes grouped by feel — neutral, harmonious, challenging, esoteric, declination — rather than an open color wheel.
Set the orb
Natal and transit orbs are independent fields on the same row, so a square can run wider in your natal chart than it does for incoming transits, if you want it to.
Toggle it on
One switch controls both natal and transit visibility together for that aspect.
Apply
Saves immediately; Reset to defaults is always available if you want to back out of your changes entirely.
Only the five majors are enabled out of the box. Free accounts can freely recolor or re-orb any aspect, including locked ones — but the moment you try to switch a minor, harmonic or declination aspect on, an upgrade prompt appears instead. A section's "select all" control respects this too: for a Free account it only enables the majors in that section, silently skipping the locked ones.
Planetary bodies
Settings → Planetary Bodies… opens a five-tab catalogue — Planets, Asteroids, Fictitious Points, Arabic Parts and Fixed Stars — covering everything from the ten core planets through numbered asteroids (Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Pholus and more), Uranian/Hamburg School points, 22 Arabic Parts, and a handful of Iranian fixed stars. Every body gets two independent toggles, Natal and Transit, so you can show the outer planets on your natal wheel while hiding them from transit overlays, or the reverse.
Asteroids tab — Natal and Transit are independent switches per row, so a body can show on one wheel type and not the other.
The core ten planets plus the lunar nodes are on by default and free to use; everything else — every asteroid, fictitious point, Arabic Part and fixed star — is Pro-locked the same way locked aspects are: you can turn one off freely, but turning one on prompts the upgrade panel.
What changes together
Every setting on this page — zodiac, ayanamsha, node type, house system, aspect orbs and colors, body visibility — is stored once for the whole app, not per birth profile. There's no way to give one saved profile a different orb table or house system from another; whatever you configure here is what every chart uses, the next time you open it.
What's next
That covers the astronomical engine itself. Next: restyling how a chart actually looks on screen — the app's own Dark/Light appearance and, separately, the twelve wheel styles you can apply to a chart — in Themes →