Every Vedic birth star - its ruling planet, deity and nature. Tap a nakshatra to read its full profile.
A nakshatra is one of 27 equal arcs of the sidereal zodiac, each 13 degrees 20 minutes wide, running from Ashwini beginning at 0 degrees of sidereal Aries to Revati ending at 360. This page lists all 27 in order with the ruling planet, the gana and the nadi of each, and opening any one of them gives its full profile.
The division is by arc, not by the visible star group, so every nakshatra is exactly the same size regardless of how large or bright the asterism it is named after appears in the sky. Because 27 does not divide 12 evenly, a nakshatra can straddle a sign boundary: Krittika, for instance, begins in Aries and ends in Taurus, which is why a birth star and a Moon sign are two separate answers rather than one.
Your janma nakshatra, or birth star, is the nakshatra the Moon occupied at the moment of your birth. The Moon covers roughly thirteen degrees a day, which is close to one nakshatra, so it changes birth star about once a day. Its speed varies between about 12 and 15 degrees a day, so the crossing interval ranges from roughly 21 to 27 hours, and a date without a time will often but not always give the right answer.
The Moon sign calculator finds it from your date, time and place, and prints the Moon's exact degree so you can see how close to a boundary the placement sits. Every nakshatra on this list links to its own profile page, which carries the ruling planet, the presiding deity, the symbol, the padas and their naming syllables.
Each nakshatra is divided into four padas of 3 degrees 20 minutes. That arc is exactly one ninth of a sign, so a pada and a navamsa division are the same span, and the pada a graha occupies determines its navamsa sign. Twenty-seven nakshatras of four padas gives 108 padas around the circle, nine to each sign.
Padas also carry the naming syllables used for a Namakarana name, four to each nakshatra, and each pada begins in a specific sign. Both are listed on the individual nakshatra profiles, along with which sign each of the four padas starts in.
Each nakshatra is assigned one of nine dasha lords, and the cycle Ketu, Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury repeats three times across the 27. The lord of your birth nakshatra rules your first Vimshottari mahadasha, and the fraction of the nakshatra the Moon had already crossed at birth is the fraction of that mahadasha already elapsed when you were born.
The nine periods total 120 years: Ketu 7, Venus 20, Sun 6, Moon 10, Mars 7, Rahu 18, Jupiter 16, Saturn 19 and Mercury 17. That is why a birth star is not decoration. It sets the timing frame the entire dasha reading runs on, which is also why a Moon sitting close to a nakshatra boundary needs a birth time precise enough to place it on the correct side.
The list shows each nakshatra's gana, one of Deva, Manushya or Rakshasa, and its nadi, one of Aadi, Madhya or Antya. Both are classification labels used by the 36-point Ashtakoot matching, where Gana koota and Nadi koota are two of the eight kootas. The individual profiles also carry the symbol, the animal and its gender, and the varna.
This app records which of those columns it can cite and which it cannot. The presiding deity has a locus, the Taittiriya Brahmana's nakshatreshti at III.1.4 to 5, and the profiles render both the devata the handbook tradition transmits and the devata the Brahmana itself names, showing the four cells where the two differ rather than resolving the difference away.
Gana, nadi, varna, animal, symbol and the naming syllables are carried as the handbook tradition transmits them and are marked uncited, because no chapter and verse has been read for them. Four further columns that were proposed - tattva, guna, direction and colour - were left out for the same reason.