Your Moon nakshatra
In Vedic Jyotish, the Moon holds your mind — its nakshatra and the daśā you were born into. A mirror of temperament and timing, not a fate.
In Vedic Jyotish, the Moon holds your mind — its nakshatra and the daśā you were born into. A mirror of temperament and timing, not a fate.
Your Moon's nakshatra (lunar mansion) and the daśā (planetary period) running at your birth, plus your rising sign (lagna) once you give a birth time and place.
We take your Moon's real ephemeris position and subtract the Lahiri ayanāṃśa to get its sidereal longitude — that's what makes this Vedic rather than Western. The nakshatra is one of 27 fixed 13°20′ slices; the Vimśottarī daśā sequence, a fixed 120-year nine-planet cycle, starts from whichever planet your Moon's nakshatra points to.
Without a listed birthplace we read your birth time in your device's time zone and print that offset on the result — pick your birthplace above and we use the clock that city actually kept that day instead, daylight saving included. In the one hour a year when clocks were turned back and that time happened twice, we read the second and also show the Moon, daśā and lagna for the first. There is no lagna without a birthplace. This is sidereal astrology, not the tropical system /astrology uses; the two don't share a zero point.
What is Vedic astrology? · Western vs. Vedic — what's the actual difference?
It's the offset between the tropical zodiac (measured from the equinox) and the sidereal zodiac (measured against the fixed stars) that Vedic astrology uses — subtracting it from a tropical position is what turns the reading sidereal.
With a birthplace, the clock that city actually kept on your birth day — its IANA time zone, so daylight saving and old standard times are looked up rather than assumed, and the offset used is printed next to your lagna. If clocks were turned back that day and your birth time happened twice, we read the second and also give the Moon, daśā and lagna for the first. Without one, we read it in your device's time zone and print that offset on the result, so if you were born somewhere else you can see the assumption and pick your birthplace instead.
Give this page a birthday and the answer begins as a single row out of twenty-seven: the patch of sidereal sky the Moon was standing in. That table has never been on this screen — it has handed you one of its rows without ever showing you the rest. Here it is in full: where each row opens, which rāśi it opens and closes in, and which daśā lord it belongs to.
| Nakshatra | Opens at | Rāśi | Daśā lord | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aśvinī | 0°00′ | Meṣa | Ketu | 7 |
| Bharaṇī | 13°20′ | Meṣa | Venus | 20 |
| Kṛttikā | 26°40′ | Meṣa → Vṛṣabha | Sun | 6 |
| Rohiṇī | 40°00′ | Vṛṣabha | Moon | 10 |
| Mṛgaśira | 53°20′ | Vṛṣabha → Mithuna | Mars | 7 |
| Ārdrā | 66°40′ | Mithuna | Rahu | 18 |
| Punarvasu | 80°00′ | Mithuna → Karka | Jupiter | 16 |
| Puṣya | 93°20′ | Karka | Saturn | 19 |
| Āśleṣā | 106°40′ | Karka | Mercury | 17 |
| Maghā | 120°00′ | Siṃha | Ketu | 7 |
| P.Phalgunī | 133°20′ | Siṃha | Venus | 20 |
| U.Phalgunī | 146°40′ | Siṃha → Kanyā | Sun | 6 |
| Hasta | 160°00′ | Kanyā | Moon | 10 |
| Chitrā | 173°20′ | Kanyā → Tulā | Mars | 7 |
| Svātī | 186°40′ | Tulā | Rahu | 18 |
| Viśākhā | 200°00′ | Tulā → Vṛścika | Jupiter | 16 |
| Anurādhā | 213°20′ | Vṛścika | Saturn | 19 |
| Jyeṣṭhā | 226°40′ | Vṛścika | Mercury | 17 |
| Mūla | 240°00′ | Dhanu | Ketu | 7 |
| P.Aṣāḍhā | 253°20′ | Dhanu | Venus | 20 |
| U.Aṣāḍhā | 266°40′ | Dhanu → Makara | Sun | 6 |
| Śravaṇa | 280°00′ | Makara | Moon | 10 |
| Dhaniṣṭhā | 293°20′ | Makara → Kumbha | Mars | 7 |
| Śatabhiṣā | 306°40′ | Kumbha | Rahu | 18 |
| P.Bhādrapadā | 320°00′ | Kumbha → Mīna | Jupiter | 16 |
| U.Bhādrapadā | 333°20′ | Mīna | Saturn | 19 |
| Revatī | 346°40′ | Mīna | Mercury | 17 |
The lord column looks like a second table bolted onto the first, and it is not: it is the row number counted nine at a time. Read it downward and the nine lords come round again and again in the same order, which is why exactly three rows — no more and no fewer — belong to each of them. Add the Years column all the way to the bottom and it comes to 360, because what you are adding is the 120-year cycle written out three times over.
That is also why a long period is no likelier than a short one. Venus hands out 20 years and the Sun 6, but each of them owns the same three of the twenty-seven rows, so the lord you are born into is a flat one-in-nine either way and the length of the period has nothing to do with the chance of starting inside it. We checked that against the sky rather than against the table: walking the real Moon hour by hour from January 1, 2006 to January 1, 2025 gives 6,857 separate stays, and the nine lords come out holding between 11.102% and 11.115% of that time, against a flat 11.111%.
Cut every row into its four padas and the table becomes a grid: 108 padas across twenty-seven rows, and exactly nine of them inside each of the twelve rāśis. The two divisions are not the same cut, and the Rāśi column is where you can see them disagree. Only three of the twelve rāśi boundaries land on a row boundary; the other nine fall inside a row, which is why nine rows in the table open in one rāśi and close in the next. Read the lords of those split rows and there are only three names among them — Sun, Mars and Jupiter — and that is not luck. The three boundaries the two cuts do share divide the circle into three identical stretches of nine rows, and the lord cycle is nine rows long as well, so the two patterns can never fall out of step.
How long does the Moon stay in one row? Not the round day you would guess. Across the same nineteen-year window the shortest stay was 20.81 hours and the longest 27.19. The mean is 24.287 hours, and that mean taken twenty-seven times over is 27.3229 days — the sidereal month, the table closing back on itself. And the spread belongs to no particular row. Taken one at a time, the shortest stay any row ever had falls between 20.81 and 21.05 hours, and the longest between 26.97 and 27.19. Every row sees very nearly the whole range.
What changes is the Moon, not the stretch of sky it is crossing. Read the same hourly samples as speed instead of as crossings and the Moon moves between 11.765 and 15.383 degrees of sidereal longitude a day. A 13°20′ row at those two speeds would take 20.80 and 27.20 hours, which lands on the pair the crossings gave to within a hundredth of an hour — by a route that never looked at a row boundary at all. The cause is distance: in that window the fastest hour found the Moon 356,562 km away and the slowest 405,621 km, against a full range of 356,500 to 406,680 km. The two ends of the speed sit at the two ends of the orbit.
This section is only about the table above, a fixed division of the circle that knows nothing about your birthday. Which row you land in is the part that does know, and it is not a lookup: it comes from an ephemeris and from the ayanāṃśa this site pins and writes down. The pada, the balance of the period you were born into, and the rising sign are worked out further up this page rather than read off these rows.