What it is
The Moon crosses the whole sky in about four weeks. The tradition divides its path into twenty-seven nakshatras, from Ashwini to Revati, each a stretch of the sky named for its stars and kept by its own deity. The nakshatra the Moon was passing through at your birth is your janma nakshatra, your birth star. Each nakshatra has four quarters, the padas, and the same path is also divided into the twelve rashis, so the Moon's place at birth also sets your Moon sign.
Families use the birth nakshatra in many ways: for the first syllable of a child's name, for matching charts before a marriage, for choosing a day for a ceremony, and in the sankalp a pandit recites at a puja. Many people know their rashi from a newspaper and have never been told their nakshatra. Our nakshatra pages describe each one.
What you enter
The form asks only for the birth. Its fields, as the web app shows them:
- Date of birth, the one field you must fill.
- Time of birth, as close as you know it.
- Place of birth, the town or city.
- For the date, the day the result is read for; it is today if you leave it.
If you leave out the time, the tool works from sunrise and tells you so. The Moon moves about one nakshatra a day, so without the time the nakshatra, or its pada, may be the one before or after.
What you get
The tool shows your nakshatra, its pada and your Moon sign from the date of birth. Where the tradition marks a birth specially, for example a Moon at a gandanta point between two signs, or a birth star among the gandamoola nakshatras, the result says so in plain words, as a thing the tradition notes, not as a cause for worry.
That result is free. If you would like more, a written reading of your birth star, prepared from your details, is a paid extra that the web app offers after the result; you never need it to see your nakshatra.
How it is worked out
The tool finds the Moon's sidereal longitude at the moment of birth, for the place you gave, and reads which of the twenty-seven equal stretches of the sky it was in, which quarter of that stretch, and which of the twelve signs. Each nakshatra spans thirteen degrees and twenty minutes of the sky, and each pada a quarter of that, so the Moon spends only a few hours in a pada.
Every answer comes from our own panchang engine, worked out for the city you choose and read on the sidereal zodiac with the Lahiri ayanamsa, the one the Calendar Reform Committee of India adopted. The same engine prints the dates and times on our calendar and panchang pages, so the tool and the calendar never disagree with each other. How we compute explains the method, and why a printed almanac from your town may differ from it by a minute or two.
Before you begin
The tool is free with a Bhagya Card account. If you are not signed in, the button above takes you to sign in first, with your mobile number or your email, and then straight to the tool.
If you have a horoscope made at your birth, keep it beside you: the tool's nakshatra should match it when the time and place are the same. If it differs, check the time first, then the place.
Questions
Is my birth nakshatra the same as my rashi?
No. Both come from the Moon at your birth, but the rashi is one of twelve signs and the nakshatra one of twenty-seven smaller mansions, so each rashi holds parts of three nakshatras.
Why does the time of birth matter?
The Moon moves through a nakshatra in about a day and through a pada in a few hours, so the time decides which one it was in, above all near a change.
Is the birth nakshatra tool free?
Yes, with a free account. Only the written reading offered after the result is paid.