Sade Sati: which phase you are in, and the dates it turns on

What it is

Saturn, Shani, moves slowly, spending about two and a half years in each sign of the zodiac. Sade Sati, "seven and a half", is the name for its passage through three signs counted from your Moon sign: the sign before it, your Moon sign itself, and the sign after it. The tradition speaks of three phases, the rising, the peak and the setting, one for each sign.

Many families hear the word with some worry. The tradition itself reads Saturn as the teacher of patience and steady work, and a pandit reads any transit against the whole of a chart, not alone. Families often keep Saturday prayers to Shani or to Hanuman through the time. The tool tells you only where Saturn stands against your Moon sign; how to keep the time is yours and your family's.

What you enter

You can give the tool your Moon sign directly, or let it find the sign from your birth. Its fields, as the web app shows them:

• Moon sign, one of the twelve rashis, if you know it.
• For the date, the day to judge Saturn's place at.
• Date of birth, Time of birth and Place of birth, if you would rather the tool found your Moon sign.
• How far to look, in years, if you want more or fewer years than the form suggests.

If you do not know your Moon sign, the birth nakshatra tool shows it too.

What you get

The tool shows which phase Saturn's transit of your Moon sign is in on the date you chose, if any, and the dates it turns on: when a phase begins and when the next begins. When Saturn turns back in the sky near one of those dates, the result marks that date as one that may move by a few days.

That result is free. If you would like more, a written reading of the phase, prepared from your details, is a paid extra that the web app offers after the result; you never need it to see the dates.

How it is worked out

The tool follows Saturn's sidereal position from the date you chose and finds the days it enters and leaves the sign before your Moon sign, your Moon sign, and the sign after. Saturn's backward loops can carry it across a sign's edge more than once, and the tool reads those crossings as they happen rather than rounding them away.

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.

Your Moon sign is the sign of the Moon at your birth, which is not always the sign a newspaper column lists for your birthday. If you are not sure of it, give your birth details instead.

Questions