The electional moment check answers a narrower question than electional search. Search asks "what is the best moment inside this date range." Moment check asks "is this specific moment good." Both use the same scoring engine, the same activity weights, the same hard stops. The output differs because the question differs — search returns a ranked list, moment check returns a single grade with the reasons behind it.
When to use moment check instead of search
The moment is already chosen. A client booked the wedding for a specific Saturday. The contract is on the table and the counter-party will not move. The surgery is scheduled and the hospital block is fixed. In all three cases search is the wrong tool — search would return better moments that you cannot use. Moment check is the right tool because it answers what you actually need to know: given the moment you have, is the chart workable.
The moment is candidate-narrow. You have already shortlisted three possible launch times, and you want to grade them side by side. Run moment check three times, compare the scores and factors, and pick the best of the three. This is faster than running a wide search and waiting for the engine to produce a heatmap.
Reading the hero card
The big letter is the grade. The number underneath is the score, 0-100. The headline tells you what the grade means for the activity in plain language. The rationale paragraph is the one-line summary the engine produced from the dominant factors. If you see a red "hard stop" badge, the engine found a disqualifying configuration and the rest of the read is advisory rather than recommendation.
Grade A and grade B moments are the ones you act on. Grade C is the working-electional zone — usable when the moment is fixed, with attention to the cautions list. Grade D and F are the ones to renegotiate if you can. The grade itself does not change the chart; it summarizes what the chart is doing. A practitioner can still use a D-grade chart with care, but the engine's recommendation is to find something better.
Supporting factors vs blocking factors
The factors list is the chart broken into the rules the engine checked. Each factor has a category (electional, lunar, mars-condition, hour-ruler, and so on), a weight class (critical, high, medium, low), and a contribution score. Positive contributions are the supporting factors — the things the chart got right for this activity. Negative contributions and failed checks are the blocking factors — the things the chart got wrong.
The engine sorts by contribution magnitude so the loudest factors are at the top. A factor with a high weight class and a high contribution is the main reason the chart is good, or the main reason it is not. A factor with a low weight class is background colour — read it for context, but the chart's quality does not hinge on it.
The personal advisories layer
Personal advisories are the optional second layer. Turn on the natal-chart overlay, supply a date, time, and place of birth, and the engine adds the rules that depend on your specific chart. A generally-good launch moment can become a poor moment for you if it activates a hard transit to your natal Sun. A generally-fair surgery moment can become a workable one for you if it lands on a benefic transit to your sixth house.
The advisories are listed separately from the base factors because they are about your relationship to the moment, not about the moment itself. Two people running moment check for the same moment will get the same base score and the same factors; only the advisories will differ. This separation matches how working practitioners think about electional — the chart is one read, the chart applied to a person is the second.
Pair it with electional search
Moment check is the single-shot companion to the electional astrology calculator. Use search to find candidate windows in a date range. Use moment check to confirm a specific minute inside one of those windows. The two tools share their scoring engine, so the grades are directly comparable — a B from search and a B from moment check mean the same quality of chart.
For the surrounding context, the sky weather calculator shows the applying aspects and ingresses that the moment-check engine is already factoring in. Reading them together helps you see why a moment scored the way it did — the supporting and blocking factors trace back to specific aspects, dignities, and house placements that sky weather lays out plainly.