Nobody wrote down the time

A birth chart is built from three things: the date, the place and the time of a birth. Plenty of people have the first two and nobody left alive who was watching a clock.

The first move is to stop calling the time missing and call it wide. You have a window 24 hours long, or a smaller one if an aunt remembers it was after dinner. A window is a measurement, and you can work out what it buys.

The sun moves about one degree in a day, the quickest planet a little over two, the slowest only a few arcminutes. So the sign each planet was in follows from the date alone. The moon moves about 13 degrees, and a sign is 30 degrees wide, so on more than half of dates the moon stayed in one sign all day. A nakshatra, one of 27 segments of that path, is only 13 degrees 20 minutes wide, so the moon almost always crossed into a new one during the day. You can be told which two. Not which.

What a wide window does not buy is the rising sign, the part of the sky coming up in the east. It changes all day, 12 signs taking a turn of two hours each. With no rising sign there are no houses, since houses are planet positions counted from the rising point. And the long planetary periods, timed from where the moon sat inside its nakshatra, slide by years.

Then the warning. It is tempting to type 12 noon into the form. The software will not complain, and the chart looks as precise as anybody else's, with nothing marking the invented part. Say what you know in words instead: date, place, no recorded time, family says after dinner.

Three honest options remain. Read the chart from the moon's sign. Use prashna, a chart cast for the moment a question is asked. Or pay for rectification, which claims to work the hour out backwards from events in a life, and refuse it if it is sold as a fee to be paid before a real reading can start.