Vedic aspect (drishti) reading: the special aspects of Mars (4th, 7th, 8th), Jupiter (5th, 7th, 9th), Saturn (3rd, 7th, 10th), the Rahu-Ketu nodal aspects, mutual aspect via parivartana exchange, aspect strength by degree, benefic aspect cancellation of dosha, and the aspect on the lagna lord that shapes personality.
An aspect is a contact, and the honest question is always how close. Whole-sign drishti treats an aspect as on or off across an entire 30-degree sign. Degree-based practice grades the same contact by orb, the angular distance from exactness. The difference between the two is the difference between a season and a date, and the grading scale is worked through in aspect strength by degree.
A worked example from the engine's calendar, run on the India 1947 chart with its Taurus lagna. Transit Jupiter reaches exact contact with natal Mercury on 5 August 2026 at an orb of 0.05 degrees. That is 3 arc minutes, effectively the same ecliptic longitude. The same transit reaches the natal Sun on 16 October 2026. By whole-sign reckoning Jupiter aspects those degrees for its entire Cancer stay, which runs in full from 27 May 2026 to 19 June 2027. By orb, each contact peaks on a single dated day. Both statements are true and they answer different questions: the sign-level aspect says which months carry the theme, the exact contact says which day the theme peaks. That density of Cancer-degree contacts is why 2026 is a heavy year for national-chart work under the exalted Jupiter transit.
The lesson the corpus paid for in public is that exactness buys timing precision, never outcome certainty. A June 2026 monsoon call was built on transit Jupiter exact on India's natal Moon in Pushya on 21 June, orb under 0.1 degrees, with a calibrated 1.41x lift on 15 historical cases. Rainfall printed 40 percent below average and the call FAILED. The contact was about as exact as contacts get, and it still missed, because no orb can rescue a wrong mechanism. In the same season the same exalted Jupiter, running through India's wealth axis, backed a residential-sales call that was graded MET. Same planet, same dignity, one hit and one miss. The orb answers when. The mechanism decides whether. Only the grade shows if the mechanism was real.
The limitation on the numbers themselves: that 1.41x lift was calibrated on 15 cases, a small sample that now carries one public miss, and the corpus treats every such figure as provisional until the sample grows. How lifts are computed, shrunk and retired is covered in calibrated lift.
Two graded calls turn on the exact-contact machinery this page describes, one on each side of the ledger.
An exact aspect that misses in public teaches more than a vague one that can never be graded. Both rows sit with the rest of the graded record, 9 flagship calls at a 50 percent hit rate, on the tracker.
A contact within a small fraction of a degree of the same longitude. The engine's example: transit Jupiter on India's natal Mercury on 5 August 2026 at an orb of 0.05 degrees, about 3 arc minutes. The same transit reaches India's natal Sun on 16 October 2026. Practice varies on where exact ends and close begins, which is why the corpus publishes the orb with every dated contact.
It sharpens the timing, never the outcome. The June 2026 monsoon call ran on a contact with an orb under 0.1 degrees and still FAILED, printing 40 percent below average. Exactness tells you when a mechanism should fire. Whether the mechanism is real is a separate question that only grading answers.
A whole-sign aspect far from exactness by degree. It still counts in classical drishti, since the sign-to-sign relation is what the old rules encode, but the corpus reads it as background theme rather than dated signal. Sign-level windows can span a year, as Jupiter's Cancer stay from 27 May 2026 to 19 June 2027 does, while the exact contacts inside it land on single days.