27 Nakshatras

The lunar zodiac the Moon actually moves through, one thirteen-degree station at a time.

Vedic astrology divides the ecliptic twice. The twelve rashis cut it into thirty-degree signs, and the twenty-seven nakshatras cut the same circle into stations of thirteen degrees and twenty minutes each, one for roughly every day the Moon takes to complete a sidereal month. The second division is the older of the two in the surviving literature, and for most practical questions it is the one an astrologer reaches for first: the nakshatra the Moon occupied at birth is what fixes the janma nakshatra, starts the Vimshottari dasha sequence, and drives almost every line of a traditional marriage-matching report.

Each station carries a fixed set of attributes. A ruling planet places it in the dasha cycle, a presiding deity gives it its register, and a symbol condenses what the classical writers thought it was doing. Alongside those sit the matching categories: the gana or temperament class, the yoni animal, the nadi channel and the rajju group, all of which reappear in the ashtakoota points used when two charts are compared. The tables on this page are computed from the same engine that powers the rest of this site rather than copied from a list, and each nakshatra's own page works through what its combination actually means.

The four padas matter as much as the station itself. Every nakshatra is quartered, and since nine padas span exactly thirty degrees, those quarters are what tie the lunar zodiac back to the solar one: a pada fixes the navamsa sign, and several nakshatras straddle a rashi boundary so that their first and last quarters sit in different signs entirely. That is also why the varna assigned in matching is shown per pada here and not per nakshatra. Pick a birth star below for its full reading, or work out which one is yours if you have never had a chart drawn.

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