Your nakshatra

Twenty-seven mansions of the Moon

The Moon takes a little over twenty-seven days to go once round the stars, so it spends roughly a day in each of twenty-seven equal parts of the sky. Indian astronomy named those parts nakshatras, and lists of them appear in Vedic texts centuries before the twelve signs reached India. Each covers 13°20′ and is cut into four padas of 3°20′, so the 108 padas fit the signs exactly, nine to a sign. Every nakshatra has a deity from the Vedic lists, a symbol from later manuals, and a lord among the nine grahas, the planets and the nodes, taken in a fixed order that runs round the circle three times.

How it is worked out here

The Moon’s position comes from the same astronomy as the rest of the site, measured from the equinox, and Lahiri’s ayanamsa is taken off it to give the sidereal longitude that Indian astrology uses. Lahiri’s value is the Indian government’s standard, and the one used here agrees with the published tables to within a few minutes of arc. The Vimshottari dashas follow Parashara’s rule: the share of the birth nakshatra the Moon still had to cross, times its lord’s years, is the first period, and the other lords follow in order, 120 years in all, counted here in years of 365.25 days. Without a birth time the Moon is placed at midday, and the page says when that leaves the answer open.

Reading the result, with an example

Under the wheel the page lists the birth nakshatra, its pada with the degrees it covers, its lord, deity and symbol, and the Moon’s longitude in both zodiacs. Take a Moon at 22° sidereal Taurus, which is 52° round from the start of the circle. Rohini, the fourth nakshatra, runs from 40° to 53°20′, so the Moon is in Rohini, and 52° lies in its last quarter, 50° to 53°20′, the fourth pada. Rohini’s lord is the Moon, whose dasha lasts ten years. Only a tenth of Rohini was left to cross, so the first dasha is the last year of the Moon’s ten, and after it come Mars for seven years, Rahu for eighteen, Jupiter for sixteen, Saturn for nineteen, Mercury for seventeen, Ketu for seven, Venus for twenty and the Sun for six. In a Western chart the same Moon would stand at about 16° Gemini.

Common confusions

A nakshatra is not the Moon sign most Western calculators give. Those use the tropical zodiac, counted from the equinox, which now runs about 24° ahead of Lahiri’s sidereal one, so the Moon sign there is often the sign after the one the nakshatra lies in. The difference between the two zodiacs, and the real constellations behind both, is set out under signs and stars.

Ayanamsas differ as well. Lahiri’s is the most widely used, but Raman’s and Krishnamurti’s give values from a few minutes to over a degree apart, and a Moon close to the edge of a nakshatra or pada can land on the other side of it. The birth time matters more than for most placements: a few minutes rarely changes the nakshatra, but each minute moves the dasha dates by a few days. The same sidereal positions, with the lagna and the houses, are drawn on the Vedic chart page, and Rahu and Ketu, two of the nine lords, have a page of their own under the nodes.

What it claims

In the tradition the birth nakshatra is read as a person’s temperament, and each dasha as a stretch of life coloured by its lord. That is the vocabulary of jyotish, set out here as it is described. The position is measured and the periods are arithmetic, and nothing on this page predicts what anyone’s years will bring.