AstroWatch can draw a chart four different ways: the familiar round Western wheel, and three traditional Vedic square layouts — North Indian, South Indian and East Indian. This page covers how to switch between them, what changes elsewhere in the app when you do, and how to read each layout.
Four ways to draw a chart
Wheel (Western) is the round chart wheel you already know from the Dashboard — houses and signs drawn as concentric rings around the centre, planets placed by degree. It's the default and the only style available on the Free tier. The three Vedic layouts are square grids instead of a wheel, and because they only make sense in the sidereal zodiac, all three are gated behind Pro — same as the Sidereal Zodiac setting itself:
- North Indian — a diamond. The houses stay fixed in place; the sign numbers rotate around the diamond starting from whichever sign holds the Ascendant (Lagna).
- South Indian — a 4×4 grid (the four corner cells are unused). The signs stay fixed — Aries always sits in the top row, second cell from the left — and the houses are what move, laid out clockwise from wherever the Ascendant's sign falls.
- East Indian — a 3×3 grid. The signs are fixed with Aries in the top-centre cell, running anti-clockwise from there.
View → Chart Style — a plain radio list of the four styles, with Divisional Chart tucked below it.
Switching styles
Pick a style from View → Chart Style — it's a plain radio list, so only one style is active at a time. Selecting North Indian, South Indian or East Indian while on the Free tier opens the same upgrade prompt as turning on the Sidereal Zodiac directly; decline it and the radio reverts to whichever style was active before. On Pro, the switch is immediate — the active chart redraws in the new style without needing to reopen it.
The Sidereal auto-sync
The square styles are Vedic by definition, so AstroWatch keeps them and the zodiac frame in sync automatically — but only in one direction. Picking a square style while the app is in Tropical mode silently flips the zodiac to Sidereal and recalculates; the Wheel style is left alone by design, since a round wheel in the sidereal frame ("Western Sidereal") is a perfectly valid combination some Vedic-leaning users prefer. The reverse guard lives in Settings → Calculation: switching the zodiac back to Tropical while a square style is active silently falls back to the Wheel, since a square chart can't be shown in Tropical.
- 1Style badge — names the active square style and divisional chart together, here "North Indian · Rāśi".
- 2House-system pill — the active house system, unaffected by the chart-style switch.
What changes when you switch to a square style
A handful of dashboard controls follow the chart style rather than the zodiac frame, so they only change for the three square layouts — a round Wheel keeps its usual Western behaviour even in the Sidereal frame:
- Bi-wheel disappears. The square styles are single-chart layouts, so the Bi-wheel toolbar button hides itself entirely. If a bi-wheel overlay was active when you switch, it's turned off for you.
- Aspects become Graha Dṛṣṭi. The Aspects toggle and its flyout hide; the Aspects card in the left column swaps its Western filter pills for a Vedic dṛṣṭi header and a graded grid instead, and the planet-detail widget's "Active Aspects" section relabels itself "Graha Dṛṣṭi."
- A style badge appears on the chart card, naming the active style and divisional chart together — e.g. South Indian · Rāśi — so it's always obvious at a glance which frame you're looking at.
- 1South Indian square chart — signs fixed, houses rotating clockwise from the Ascendant's sign.
- 2Graha Dṛṣṭi header — the Aspects card's Western filter pills are replaced with pāda + sphuṭa strength readouts.
Reading each layout
The one habit worth building early: check which axis is fixed before you start reading a square chart. North Indian fixes the houses in place and rotates the signs; South and East Indian fix the signs in place and rotate the houses. Once that clicks, jumping between all four styles on the same chart is a fast way to sanity-check a reading from more than one traditional angle.
What's next
Chart style is one axis of layering a chart; the other is how many charts are on screen at once — a natal wheel with a live transit ring around it, a synastry overlay, or up to four independent rings in the Expanded Chart View. That's covered next: Multi-Wheel & Bi-Wheel →