Nakshatra Finder
Find your birth star and its pada from your date, time and place of birth.
Find your birth star and its pada from your date, time and place of birth.
Your nakshatra is the lunar mansion the Moon occupied when you were born - one of 27, each divided into four padas. Enter your birth details above to find yours, along with the rest of the panchanga for that moment: the tithi, the weekday, the yoga and the karana.
The familiar twelve signs each cover 30 degrees of the zodiac. The older lunar frame cuts the same circle into 27 equal parts instead. Each part measures exactly 13 degrees 20 minutes, and 27 of them fill the full 360 degrees with nothing left over. Each of these segments is a nakshatra, usually called a birth star in English. The counting starts where the signs start: Ashwini opens the circle, Revati closes it.
The Moon is the reason for 27. It returns to the same fixed star in a little over 27 days, so it crosses roughly one segment a day. A 30-degree sign is too wide to say anything useful about where the Moon is on a given date. A band of 13 degrees 20 minutes is narrow enough to be worth reporting.
Your birth star is the band the Moon occupied at the moment of birth. The same measure applies to every planet and to the rising point, so a full report may list a star for each of them. When somebody asks for their star without saying more, they mean the Moon's.
Every band is divided into four equal quarters, called padas. A quarter measures 3 degrees 20 minutes, and four of them rebuild the 13 degrees 20 minutes above them. Across the whole circle that comes to 108 quarters, the same 108 that turns up in a prayer bead string. This is why a result reads as a name plus a number, such as pada 2.
The quarter is not a decoration. 3 degrees 20 minutes is also one ninth of a 30-degree sign, and one ninth of a sign is one navamsa, the D9 division. So the quarter a planet occupies names its navamsa sign directly. The two systems are one piece of arithmetic seen from two sides. Two people born the same morning can share a band and still sit in different quarters, which is where their finer readings part company.
The 27 are also sorted into three groups called ganas. Deva means divine, manushya means human, and rakshasa is usually translated as fierce or demonic. In the standard classification, nine fall in each group. The English words sound far more dramatic than the use they are put to. Read them as broad temperament labels: gentle and cooperative, ordinary and mixed, forceful and self-directed.
The working use of this sort is marriage matching. In the point-based compatibility method used across much of India, one of the eight tested factors compares the two groups. Same group scores well, and the divine and fierce groups together score the lowest. The exact point table differs a little between schools. It carries only a small share of the total, and a third of all people share your group, so it is never read on its own.
A ruling planet is attached to every one of the 27 bands. That ownership is the hinge of the most widely used timing method in Indian astrology, the Vimshottari dasha, a scheme of planetary periods. The full cycle runs 120 years and is shared among nine planets, each holding one long period. The planet ruling the nakshatra the Moon occupied at birth is the one whose period is already running when a person is born.
The starting planet is only half of the calculation. The method also asks how far into that band the Moon had already travelled. That fraction is the part of the first period already spent before birth. A child born near the start of the band receives almost the whole period. One born near its end receives a remainder and moves on to the next planet early.
Every sub-period below it inherits from that one measurement. A small error in the Moon's position moves the whole ladder of dates. The value of a birth star report is therefore not only the label. It is the degree behind the label, which is what the timing system actually consumes.
Tradition attaches a sound to each of the 108 quarters. At the naming ceremony the child's formal name is meant to begin with the sound belonging to the quarter the Moon held at birth. Many families keep that name for ritual use and call the child something else at home. If you were named this way, the quarter number is what your elders were working from.
For marriage matching, the two birth stars are the raw input. The eight-fold point system takes the Moon's star and sign for both people and compares them factor by factor: the group described above, the ruling planets and how they regard each other, the count from one star to the other, and more. Finding your own star is the step that comes before any of that.
The third common use is muhurta, choosing a time to start something. There it is not your birth star that matters but the segment the Moon is passing through on the day in question. Some traditions add a twenty-eighth, Abhijit, for this purpose only. The ordinary count of 27 is what a birth report uses.
What is a nakshatra?
One of 27 divisions of the zodiac, each spanning 13 degrees 20 minutes. Your birth nakshatra is the one the Moon occupied at your moment of birth, and it is used for naming, matching and the Vimshottari dasha system.
What is a pada?
Each nakshatra is divided into four quarters called padas, each of 3 degrees 20 minutes. The pada narrows the reading and is what links your birth star to a specific navamsa sign.
Do I need my birth time to find my nakshatra?
The Moon moves through roughly one nakshatra a day, so the date alone is often enough to get close. Birth time matters when you were born near a boundary, and it is always needed for the pada.