The 27 Nakshatras: list, rulers, padas and how they work

Plenty of people meet Vedic astrology already knowing their sun sign, and expect the system to work the same way with different labels. It does not. The twelve rashis exist here too, but the Vimshottari dasha, nakshatra-based muhurta and several components of Ashtakoot matching run through a second division of the same circle into twenty-seven parts. That division is the nakshatra system.

Twenty-seven parts, and a Moon that crosses one a day

The Moon completes a sidereal circuit in about 27.3 days, so the twenty-seven fold division gives it roughly one nakshatra a day, which is what the English "lunar mansion" is reaching for. That is why the grid fits the Moon. It is not a record of why the texts chose twenty-seven, and some of them count twenty-eight (below).

Your nakshatra is the Moon's

Every planet moves through both divisions, so neither belongs to the Sun or the Moon. The sign newspaper astrology gives you from your birthday is the Sun's tropical sign. The three operations on this page, your birth nakshatra, the Vimshottari dasha and the matching classifications, all take the Moon's position as their input. When you are asked for your nakshatra, you are being asked where the Moon was when you were born.

All 27, at a glance

Spans, rulers and signs below are arithmetic on the circle. Gana, yoni and nadi are read off the tables our matching engine scores with, and checked against the koota tables in the documentation of the Maitreya astrology program, listed on our sources page; we cite no classical verse for them. English glosses of the yoni animals vary between tables (mesha appears as sheep, ram or goat, and gow as cow or bull), but which nakshatras share an animal does not.

Spans are sidereal longitude, so they are measured from the start of sidereal Aries rather than from the equinox. The section on Western signs below explains the difference.

A Vedic list, and a twenty-eighth nakshatra

The Taittiriya Brahmana (1.5.1) lists twenty-seven nakshatras, each with its deity, and it begins at Krittika rather than at Ashwini, where the table above and the later astrological texts begin. Read in Sanskrit, in order:

The names are matched by position in the sequence; several differ from the later ones. The deities are the Brahmana's, and we do not claim later texts assign them the same way.

Abhijit, the one left out

The next section of the same text (1.5.2.3) names a further nakshatra, Abhijit, "above the Ashadhas and below Shrona". The Surya Siddhanta gives positions for twenty-eight asterisms but divides the circle into twenty-seven portions, and Burgess and Whitney's notes on chapter 8 show that Abhijit is the one left without a portion; the same notes observe that the Taittiriya Samhita (4.4.10) omits it from its list.

So the texts count both ways, and the twenty-seven-fold division is the one the equal 13 degree 20 grid, the dashas and this page use.

That these lists are old shows the nakshatras were enumerated in Vedic literature. How the texts are dated, and whether the twenty-seven came before the twelve signs in India, are open questions we do not settle here.

Rulers, and the timing they set

RulerKetuVenusSunMoonMarsRahuJupiterSaturnMercury

0°AriesTaurusGeminiCancer

1Ashwini2Bharani3Krittika4Rohini5Mrigashira6Ardra7Punarvasu8Pushya9Ashlesha

120°LeoVirgoLibraScorpio

10Magha11Purva Phalguni12Uttara Phalguni13Hasta14Chitra15Swati16Vishakha17Anuradha18Jyeshtha

240°SagittariusCapricornAquariusPisces

19Mula20Purva Ashadha21Uttara Ashadha22Shravana23Dhanishtha24Shatabhisha25Purva Bhadrapada26Uttara Bhadrapada27Revati

The rulers repeat in a fixed cycle of nine, so the cycle runs exactly three times round the zodiac and each ruler holds three nakshatras 120 degrees apart. In the Vimshottari dasha system, the dasha scheme our engine computes, each ruler also holds a fixed number of years:

7

20

6

10

7

18

16

19

17

1. Ketu7
2. Venus20
3. Sun6
4. Moon10
5. Mars7
6. Rahu18
7. Jupiter16
8. Saturn19
9. Mercury17

Ketu

Venus

Sun

Moon

Mars

Rahu

Jupiter

Saturn

Mercury

A seed value, not a personality type

The Moon's nakshatra decides which period you are born into, and its exact degree within that nakshatra decides how much of the period is left. Someone born at the very start of Rohini begins with the full ten-year Moon period ahead; someone born near its end gets only days or weeks of it before Mars begins. That makes the nakshatra a seed value for a timing sequence rather than a personality label: two people born an hour apart share the same nine-period cycle but can enter it at a different point.

Padas: where a nakshatra meets a sign

Each nakshatra divides into four padas of 3 degrees 20 minutes, which gives 108 in all and exactly nine in each sign. Nakshatra and sign boundaries only line up every 120 degrees, so nine nakshatras cross from one sign into the next. Krittika begins in Aries and finishes in Taurus.

That is why a reading that names the nakshatra without the pada can be wrong about the sign: being "in Krittika" puts the Moon in Mars-ruled Aries in its first pada and in Venus-ruled Taurus in the other three, while the nakshatra's own ruler stays the Sun.

Worked through, once

Take a sidereal Moon longitude of 38 degrees 20 minutes.

1. Which nakshatra. Boundaries fall every 13 degrees 20 minutes. 38 degrees 20 sits between 26 degrees 40 and 40 degrees: the third nakshatra, Krittika.
2. How far into it. 38 degrees 20 minus 26 degrees 40 leaves 11 degrees 40 minutes of a 13 degree 20 span.
3. Which pada. Quarters break at 3 degrees 20, 6 degrees 40 and 10 degrees, so 11 degrees 40 is the fourth pada, which runs from 36 degrees 40 to 40 degrees and sits inside Taurus. Only Krittika's first pada is in Aries.
4. Which dasha, and how much is left. Krittika's ruler is the Sun, with a 6-year period. Seven eighths of the nakshatra is behind the Moon, so one eighth of the period remains: 6 years divided by 8, or 9 months, before the sequence moves on to the Moon.

Change the longitude and every line changes with it. Once four conventions are fixed, the Lahiri sidereal longitude, the equal twenty-seven-fold division, the Vimshottari scheme, and prorating the first period by how far the Moon has travelled through its nakshatra, which is how our engine computes the balance, none of it depends on interpretation. The conventions themselves are set out on the methodology page.

Why your Vedic and Western signs differ

This site's calculations are sidereal: they measure positions against the fixed stars, using the Lahiri ayanamsha. Newspaper sun-sign astrology is tropical and measures against the equinox. Under Lahiri the two frames coincided and have drifted about 24 degrees apart since around 285 CE; that offset is the ayanamsha, and other ayanamshas put it slightly differently.

Why you are told a different sign

Twenty-four degrees is most of a sign, so for about four birthdays in five your sidereal Sun sign is the one before the newspaper one. Neither is wrong within its own frame. The Surya Siddhanta gives the asterisms' junction stars sidereal positions (chapter 8); the Lahiri ayanamsha our calculations use is a modern value for a sidereal frame, defined from the star Chitra, not the Surya Siddhanta's own figure. Nakshatra positions carry the same offset, which is why you cannot read nakshatras off a Western chart without correcting first.

How to actually use this

If you are reading your own chart, work in this order:

1. The Moon's nakshatra and pada. They set your dasha sequence and where in it you are.
2. The lagna, or rising sign, and its nakshatra. In the whole-sign houses this site uses, the lagna fixes the houses of the chart.
3. Planets in signs. This is where sun-sign horoscopes start, and on its own it is the coarsest of the three.

Why the birth time matters

The lagna is the time-sensitive one: it moves through a nakshatra in roughly an hour, and how roughly depends on where you are and what is rising. Computed for Delhi (28.61° N, 77.21° E) across a full day under Lahiri, the crossings run from about 37 to 63 minutes, and 12 of the 27 take longer than an hour. If your recorded birth time is rounded to the half hour, treat the lagna nakshatra as provisional.

The Moon's nakshatra is far less sensitive, since the Moon crosses one in about a day; a rounded time matters for it only when the Moon was near a boundary, and the pada is four times as sensitive as the nakshatra.

The classifications that matchmaking runs on

Ashtakoot matching is where gana, yoni and nadi stop looking like trivia. Its score has eight components worth 36 points in all, and the three below, gana, yoni and nadi, are worth 18 of them. Each nakshatra's value for all three is in the table above.

The one animal without a pair

Twenty-seven will not split into fourteen pairs, so one animal is left with a single nakshatra: in the Ashtakoot yoni table it is Uttara Ashadha, the mongoose. The Maitreya documentation's yoni table pairs that mongoose with Abhijit, a twenty-eighth nakshatra that the list of twenty-seven leaves out, which is why it has no partner here. We present the table as the convention it is.

Nadi, the heaviest of the three

Nadi carries the heaviest weight of the three, 8 of the 36 points, and the full 8 go to a couple whose nadis differ. We know of no study measuring how often a nadi clash decides a match in practice, so we make no claim about it.

What a matching score is not

Whether these classifications should carry weight in a real decision is a separate question from whether the system computes them correctly, and this page only answers the second. Our position is that a matching score is a traditional calculation and not a verdict on a relationship, and we do not present it as one.

What kind of claim is each part of this

The nakshatra system is precise positional astronomy attached to a body of interpretive tradition, and the two are easy to blur. They are different claims, checked in different ways:

Treating the first rows as evidence for the last is a category error. Kept separate, the system is an inherited framework for thinking about timing, and that is how it is used here.

Where to go next

To find your own nakshatra and pada you need the Moon's sidereal longitude at your birth time; a VedicBirth reading works it out against your chart. Our methodology page sets out the ephemeris, ayanamsha and rounding used for every calculation on this site, and the sources page lists the texts and editions we work from.

One muhurta system does not need the Moon at all. Choghadiya divides the day from sunrise to sunset, and the night from sunset to the next sunrise, into eight parts each, named in an order fixed by the weekday.