Which nakshatra were you born under?

What this tool computes

It finds the exact position of the Moon at the moment you were born and reports which of the twenty-seven nakshatras that position falls in, and which quarter of it. The zodiac is divided into twenty-seven arcs of thirteen degrees and twenty minutes each; whichever arc held the Moon is your janma nakshatra. Each arc is divided again into four padas of three degrees twenty minutes. So the answer is not one number but two: the star, and the quarter of the star.

The pada is the part that gets lost

The Moon covers roughly thirteen degrees a day, which means it stays in one nakshatra for about a day — but crosses a pada boundary roughly every six hours. A lookup made from your date alone will usually name the right star and has no way at all to name the right pada. That matters, because the padas are what give star-based matching its resolution. Twenty-seven stars times four quarters is one hundred and eight positions, and the base rates published on this site are measured across all 11,664 ordered pairings of those positions.

We compute the Moon rather than use a rounded date lookup. Our sampled Sun-through-Saturn validation against JPL measured a largest difference of 0.44 arc-seconds. This is a measured result for the tested epochs, not a guarantee for every boundary or birth input.

What the result means, and what it does not

A nakshatra is a position. It is not a personality, and it is not a forecast. What it does is index rows in the tables that matching rules read: your nadi, your gana, your yoni, your rajju, your Vimshottari starting period. Several of those tables are what an astrologer is consulting when a match is refused.

Knowing your star is knowing which row of the table was read about you.

Nadi is the clearest example of why that is worth having. It is read directly off the nakshatra, with no reference to birth time or place, and it carries the largest single block of points in Ashtakoota. Across every possible pairing, 33.3% score zero on it. That is a fact about the table, not about any couple.

Can I find my nakshatra without a birth time?

Partly. The star itself is usually determinable from the date and a rough time of day, since it changes about once every twenty-four hours. The pada is not, unless your time is good to within an hour or two. If your birth time is uncertain, the honest position is that you know your star and not your quarter.

My family recorded a different nakshatra. Which is right?

Check three things before assuming an error: whether the recorded time was standard time or local time, whether the Moon was near a boundary that day, and which ayanamsa the original calculation used. Any of the three can move a birth across a line. Where your Moon sits close to a boundary, this page says how close.

Is Abhijit a twenty-eighth nakshatra?

It appears in some classical sources, but it overlaps the end of Uttara Ashadha and the beginning of Shravana rather than sitting between them as an equal division. It is used for one specific purpose in some traditions and ignored in others. A report that treats it as a twenty-eighth arc of the zodiac has departed from ordinary practice and ought to say so.