Nakshatra Calculator

Your nakshatra is the one of 27 lunar mansions, each 13°20′ wide, that held the sidereal Moon at the moment of birth. Enter a date of birth above and the calculator names it with its pada, ruling planet and rashi. Leave the time blank and it lists every nakshatra the Moon touched that day, with the changeover times.

The Moon is the fastest body a panchang tracks. It spends between 20.8 and 27.2 hours in a nakshatra, 24.3 on average, and roughly six hours in each pada, so a birth date narrows the answer to one or two nakshatras but rarely settles the pada. That is why the tool asks for the time zone even when you skip the time: the date only means something once you say where the clock was.

How to find your nakshatra by date of birth

1. Enter the birth date. Month, day and year, exactly as the birth certificate gives them.
2. Pick the time zone that applied at the birth, not where you live now. A child born in Chennai and raised in Toronto still needs UTC+5:30. If summer time was in force on that date, choose the summer offset; the labels name the common cases.
3. Add the birth time if you have it. With a time, you get one nakshatra and one pada, the Moon’s exact position inside the nakshatra, and a link that carries the same birth data into the dasha calculator. Without one, you get the day’s nakshatras and every pada change in your zone, so you can match them against whatever partial memory of the hour exists.
4. Read the pada timeline. It shows each pada that overlapped your calendar day, with its rashi, start and end. Your own row is marked when the time is known.

What if I don’t know my birth time?

Expect a changeover. A nakshatra lasts about a day, so the boundary almost always falls somewhere inside your 24 hours: across 1950 to 2050, only about one date in 25 keeps the same nakshatra from midnight to midnight in Indian time. The calculator gives you the switch-over minute, for example Vishakha before it and Anuradha after it. If the family remembers only “early morning” or “after lunch”, that is usually enough to choose between the two nakshatras, though not between padas. A pada lasts about six hours, so it needs the time to within an hour or two, and the dasha balance needs the minute.

Worked example: a birth at 10:30 IST on 14 October 2026

Drik panchang’s New Delhi page for 14 October 2026 lists Anuradha until 04:03 AM on the 15th, with pada changes at 08:15 AM, 02:49 PM and 09:25 PM. The calculator gives those same four times for that date, to the minute. A baby born at 10:30 IST therefore lands in Anuradha pada 2, which runs from 08:15 to 14:49.

The tool reports the Moon at 7°48′ of Vrischika, a third of the way through Anuradha. Anuradha is ruled by Saturn and presided over by Mitra, so this child’s Vimshottari dasha opens in a Saturn mahadasha with 12 years, 7 months and 16 days still to run, ending on 31 May 2039. Move the birth to 15:00 and the nakshatra stays the same, the pada becomes 3, and the Saturn balance drops by more than three years, which shows how much more work the time does for the dasha than for the star itself.

All 27 nakshatras: ruling planet, deity, span and rashi

Every nakshatra has a fixed slice of the sidereal zodiac, so the span column never changes from one birth to the next. The rashi column shows where a nakshatra crosses a sign boundary: Krittika, Mrigashira, Punarvasu, Uttara Phalguni, Chitra, Vishakha, Uttara Ashadha, Dhanishta and Purva Bhadrapada each sit across two rashis, which is why someone born in Krittika can be Mesha or Vrishabha depending on the pada. The ruling planets repeat in a fixed cycle of nine, and that cycle is the backbone of the Vimshottari dasha.

Lords and deities as given in the List of Nakshatras on Wikipedia, checked October 2026. Spans are exact: 13°20′ per nakshatra and 3°20′ per pada from sidereal 0° Mesha. Source: saturnreturn-calculator.com

Rashi and nakshatra: how the two charts fit together

A rashi is 30° and a pada is 3°20′, so each rashi holds exactly nine padas, the same as two and a quarter nakshatras. Across the zodiac that makes 108 padas, nine to every sign. When people ask for a rashi nakshatra chart, this is the arithmetic behind it: Mesha takes all of Ashwini and Bharani plus the first pada of Krittika, Vrishabha takes the other three padas of Krittika, all of Rohini and half of Mrigashira, and the pattern repeats three times around the circle, ending with Meena holding the last pada of Purva Bhadrapada, all of Uttara Bhadrapada and all of Revati.

The practical upshot is that a nakshatra name alone does not always tell you the rashi, while a nakshatra and pada always do. Uttara Phalguni pada 1 is Simha; padas 2 to 4 are Kanya. That matters for Sade Sati, which is counted from the rashi, so if a horoscope gives you a nakshatra without a pada, check the rashi before you look up any Saturn dates. The moon sign calculator lists the full rashi by rashi breakdown and gives the exact minute the Moon changed sign on a boundary date.

Why two calculators can give you different nakshatras

Most disagreements come from four places, and only one of them is a genuine difference of opinion.

• A different ayanamsa. This calculator uses Lahiri, the default on drik panchang. The Raman ayanamsa sits 1°27′ away from Lahiri in October 2026, according to the Swiss Ephemeris, which moves every nakshatra boundary by about two and a half hours of Moon travel. The KP ayanamsa differs from Lahiri by under 6 arcminutes, about 11 minutes of time, so the two agree except right at a changeover.
• The wrong time zone. Entering a US birth time as if it were IST shifts the Moon by over five degrees. Summer time does the same on a smaller scale: one forgotten hour is half a degree, enough to change the pada on about one birth in six.
• The sunrise day. A panchang runs its day from sunrise to sunrise, so drik’s page for 14 October lists times up to 04:03 AM on the 15th. A baby born at 03:00 on the 15th belongs to the 14th’s panchang page, and someone reading that page as a midnight-to-midnight date can pick the wrong line. The nakshatra itself is decided by the Moon’s position at the minute of birth, whichever calendar day you file it under.
• A rough Moon. A short lunar series, like the 12-term one this site ran until October 2026, can be off by a fifth of a degree, which is twenty minutes of time at a boundary. The current engine carries 60 periodic terms and sits within about 3 arcseconds of the Swiss Ephemeris, so a disagreement of more than a minute or two with drik panchang usually means an input differs.

How the calculation works, and its limits

The Moon’s longitude comes from the lunar theory in Jean Meeus’s Astronomical Algorithms, chapter 47, which keeps the 60 largest terms of the ELP-2000/82 series. Checked against the Swiss Ephemeris on 2,000 random instants between 1920 and 2060, the root-mean-square error is 3 arcseconds and the worst case 11, which is under 25 seconds of the Moon’s motion. Subtracting the Lahiri ayanamsa gives the sidereal longitude; dividing by 13°20′ gives the nakshatra and by 3°20′ the pada. Entry and exit times are found by stepping forward and back an hour at a time and then halving the gap down to one second.

The limits are the inputs, not the astronomy. The calculator cannot know whether a hospital rounded the time to the nearest five minutes, and it cannot correct a time zone you did not choose. It covers births from 1920 onward. It does not cast a full horoscope, so it has no lagna, no house positions and no navamsa; the nakshatra, pada, lord and rashi are what it is built to get exactly right.