Nakshatra Calculator — Find Your Birth Star

What this calculator tells you

Enter your birth date, time and place and you get the nakshatra, the pada (which quarter of it), the Moon's exact degree, your Moon sign (rashi), the nakshatra's ruling planet, its deity and symbol, and the three attributes used in matching — gana, nadi and yoni. It also tells you which mahadasha you were born into and how many years of it were left, and the name syllable for your pada.

Two things most calculators skip: we check whether the Moon changed nakshatra on your birth date, so you know how much your birth time actually matters, and we show the Moon's degree and the ayanamsa used, so you can compare with any other source.

Don't know your birth time?

Tick “I don't know my birth time”. The Moon moves about 13° a day, and a nakshatra is 13°20′ wide, so on roughly two days in three the Moon stays in one nakshatra from midnight to midnight — your answer is certain. On the other days it crosses into the next one; we show both and the time of the change (“Rohini before 14:36, Mrigashira after”), so even “born in the morning” is usually enough to settle it. The pada is finer — about six hours each — so that part may stay open.

Nakshatra vs rashi

Both come from the Moon. The rashi is the 30° sign the Moon is in; the nakshatra is the finer 13°20′ division. Each sign holds two and a quarter nakshatras (Aries has Ashwini, Bharani and the first quarter of Krittika). Newspaper horoscopes use the rashi. Naming, the dasha sequence and most of the Ashtakoota matching points use the nakshatra. If a pandit asks for your “janma nakshatra and rashi”, this page gives both.

Why your nakshatra can differ between websites

Almost always it is the ayanamsa — the offset between the tropical zodiac and the sidereal one. We use Lahiri, the standard adopted by India's Calendar Reform Committee and used by Drik Panchang, AstroSage and most Indian software. Sites using Raman or KP ayanamsa place every planet up to about 1.5° differently, which matters only if your Moon is near a boundary. The other culprits are the time zone (an old birth entered with today's daylight-saving rules) and calculators that silently use noon. If you see a different answer elsewhere, compare the Moon's degree, not just the name — ours is printed on the result.

The same engine casts the full chart on the free kundli page, so what you see here matches what you see there, planet for planet.