Relocation / Astrocartography — Where Should You Live?

Astrocartography (sometimes called locational astrology or simply relocation) asks a simple question: does the place I live activate the best planets in my chart, or the most challenging ones?

KarmaWheel's Relocation feature gives you a Vedic, fully sidereal answer. Open Features → Relocation / Astrocartography (or use the hamburger drawer entry). The app draws all four lines for each of your nine planets across a world map and then tells you which populous cities sit on your favorable lines — and which sit on lines you'd want to approach with awareness.

How astrocartography works

At the moment of your birth, every planet is somewhere in the sky relative to your location. Some planets are rising on the eastern horizon, others setting in the west; one planet is crossing the Midheaven directly overhead while another is at the bottom of the sky beneath you.

Now imagine a different observer, somewhere else on Earth, looking at the sky at that same instant. For them, the same planets are at different positions. Somewhere on Earth, every planet was on someone's eastern horizon. Somewhere else, on the Midheaven. Somewhere else, setting; somewhere else, anti-culminating.

Connect all the places where a single planet was on the Midheaven and you get a vertical line of longitude. Same for the IC (Underworld), AC (Ascendant), and DC (Descendant) — though those last two are curves, not straight lines.

KarmaWheel computes all four lines for each of your nine planets — 36 lines in total — and overlays them on a world map.

The four line types

Each planet has four angular lines. Each activates a different life domain:

Line	Where the planet is	What it activates
MC	Midheaven (directly overhead)	Career, public reputation, peak achievement
IC	Anti-culmination (directly beneath)	Home, family roots, inner foundation
AC	Rising (eastern horizon)	Identity, body, daily personality
DC	Setting (western horizon)	Relationships, partnership, the other

So living within ~3° of (for example) your Jupiter MC line would activate Jupiter's themes — wisdom, expansion, fortune, dharma — in your career. Living near your Jupiter DC line would activate Jupiter through partnerships.

Vedic-specific scoring

Most Western astrocartography just plots the lines and lets you decide. KarmaWheel goes further: it scores each planet for your chart using classical Vedic functional benefic / malefic logic.

The scoring blends:

Functional dignities — your Lagna lord, 5th lord, and 9th lord are functional benefics (favorable). Your 6th lord, 8th lord, and 12th lord are functional malefics (challenging). These rotate by ascendant — Saturn is a yogakaraka for Libra Lagna but a malefic for Aries Lagna.
Natural benefics / malefics — Jupiter and Venus get a positive bump; Saturn, Mars, Rahu and Ketu get a negative one.
Dignity bonus — exalted planets get +2; debilitated planets get -2.

The result is a per-planet quality label: very_favorable, favorable, neutral, challenging, or very_challenging.

This is a heuristic — it doesn't replace a full Jaimini analysis or detailed dasha consideration — but it gives you a fast first pass on which planets you'd want closer in your daily life and which you'd rather keep at a distance.

Reading the map

Open Relocation and you'll see:

The world map — equirectangular projection, blue ocean, dark continents, with all 36 of your planet lines overlaid.
Planet pills above the map — toggle each planet's lines on or off. Useful when the map gets busy.
A yellow star marking your birth location (the place all the lines emanate from in some sense).
Green dots — populous cities on your favorable planet lines.
Red dots — cities on your challenging planet lines.
Below the map: the favorable cities list (move-here candidates) and challenging cities list (be-aware candidates).

Line styles encode the angle:

Solid line = MC
Dashed line = IC
Dotted line = AC
Dot-dash line = DC

How cities are picked

KarmaWheel queries its full GeoNames-based cities database for places with population ≥ 200,000 and finds those within 3° (roughly 330 km at the equator) of one of your planet lines.

For each candidate city, the system picks the best line passing through it (by quality score, then by distance) and shows that line in the city's row.

Cities are then sorted by quality first (very_favorable above favorable above neutral), then by score, then by closeness, then by population.

Practical interpretation

When the report says "Move to Bangkok, Thailand — Jupiter MC line, 1.2° off":

Living in Bangkok would activate Jupiter's career themes for you.
Jupiter being a very_favorable planet for your specific chart means: career here is likely expansive, growth-oriented, dharmic, with mentors and good fortune more visible than in places without strong Jupiter activation.
1.2° off means the line passes ~130 km from Bangkok — close enough to count. Closer is stronger; on the line is strongest.

When the report says "Approach with awareness — Cairo, Egypt — Saturn AC line, 0.6° off":

This doesn't mean "never go to Cairo". It means Saturn's themes (delays, hardship, structure, discipline, slow accumulation, public scrutiny) are likely to be activated through your identity (AC).
For someone whose chart benefits from Saturn discipline, this could be a good thing. For someone whose Saturn is already oppressive, it could intensify that.

The 3° rule

Within 3° (~330 km) of a line, the planet's energy is considered active. Within 1°, strongly active. Right on the line, dominant.

This is approximate — astrocartography isn't a strict on/off system. Think of the lines as energetic "rivers" with a current that fades the further you stand from the bank.

Combining with dasha

A favorable Jupiter line in Bangkok matters more during your Jupiter Mahadasha than during your Saturn one. Astrocartography activates a planet's placement potential, but the active dasha still gates when that potential lives loudest.

A useful sequence:

Identify your current Mahadasha + Antardasha lord(s).
In KarmaWheel's Relocation map, look for cities on those specific planets' lines.
Cross-reference with classical timing: is now a good year for the move (Jupiter / Venus dasha periods classically support relocation)?

Birth-time accuracy

Astrocartography is highly sensitive to birth time. Even 5 minutes off can shift a line by ~1.25° — enough to move a city from "on the line" to "off the line".

If your birth time is uncertain, run KarmaWheel's Birth Time Rectification helper first, or hand-rectify against major life events before trusting the relocation lines.

What's NOT in the lines

A few things astrocartography doesn't tell you:

Climate, language, cost of living, visa availability — practical considerations matter. The chart says "this planet is strong here"; it doesn't say "the rent is reasonable".
The chart of the place itself — a city, a country, has its own natal chart (founding date) that interacts with yours. Advanced practitioners look at both.
Synastry with people there — moving for a person is a different question than moving to a planet line.
Karma you specifically need to face — sometimes the right move is toward a challenging line because that's the work this life is asking of you.

Example use cases

Career stagnation, considering a move Look for your Jupiter, Sun, or 10th-lord MC lines. These activate dharmic career growth.

Want to find love / marriage Look for your Venus DC line, or your Jupiter / 7th-lord DC line.

Spiritual deepening Look for your Ketu MC or AC line, or your Jupiter line in the 9th or 12th-house meaning. Often these are remote, quiet places.

Need stability and home Look for Moon or Venus IC lines, or 4th-lord IC line.

Avoiding hardship Stay away from your Saturn lines if Saturn is a functional malefic for your Lagna. Stay away from Mars lines for the same reason.

In KarmaWheel

The Relocation feature opens to a world map. You can:

Toggle individual planets on/off via the colored pills above the map.
Click cities in the list to see distance and which line activates them.
Hover over map dots for a tooltip showing the city + planet + line.
Switch ayanamsha in Settings — the lines re-compute automatically.

Caveats

This is a heuristic v1. KarmaWheel will continue refining the scoring (it currently doesn't fully weight nakshatra placement, navamsa dignity, or current dasha activation in the planet quality score). Treat the recommendations as a first filter — visit a place before relocating, and consult an astrologer for deeper analysis.