Vedic moon sign & nakshatra calculator

Vedic Astrology and the Nakshatras

Jyotisha, 'the science of light', is the traditional astrology of India and one of the six auxiliary sciences of the Vedas, originally concerned with fixing the times of ritual. Horoscopic astrology entered India from the Hellenistic world in the early centuries CE — Sanskrit astrological terms such as hora and kendra are borrowed from Greek — and was combined with an older Indian system of lunar mansions.

Unlike Western astrology, Jyotisha uses a sidereal zodiac, fixed to the stars. The difference between the two zodiacs, the ayanamsa, grows by about one degree every 72 years; the Indian government's calendar reform committee adopted the Lahiri ayanamsa (about 24° in the 2020s), which is used on this site. As a result most people's Vedic sun sign is the sign before their Western one.

In Indian practice the moon is more important than the sun. The moon sign (Chandra rashi) and the birth star or nakshatra — the moon's position among twenty-seven lunar mansions of 13°20' each — are central to naming, marriage matching and the timing of life. Each nakshatra is divided into four padas and is ruled by one of nine 'planets' (including the lunar nodes Rahu and Ketu), whose order determines the Vimshottari dasha, a 120-year scheme of planetary periods that begins from the birth nakshatra.