Where every planet actually was

What this computes

Where each of the nine grahas stood at the moment and place you were born, given as a sidereal longitude — a degree, a minute and a second measured around the zodiac — together with the nakshatra and pada that longitude falls in, the sign, and the house. The chart-based matching calculations on this site are built on top of these nine numbers.

The positions come from a modern ephemeris rather than from a printed table. Checked against NASA JPL ephemerides at 2000sampled epochs from 1900 to 2100, the largest measured disagreement among the seven tested Sun-through-Saturn bodies was 0.44 arc-seconds, against a tolerance of 2. An arc-second is one three-thousand-six-hundredth of a degree. At that size the tested positions agree closely. This measurement is not a bound for every date, the lunar nodes, house assignments or astrological interpretations.

The two things a table of degrees does not say

The first is the ayanamsa — the offset between the tropical zodiac the sky is measured in and the sidereal one Vedic astrology uses. Lahiri, Raman and Krishnamurti place it differently. Lahiri and Raman differ by more than a degree around the present epoch. Even a smaller offset can matter near a nakshatra boundary, at which point the offset decides the pada, and the pada decides a koota score.

Two people can hold correct planetary tables that disagree, and the disagreement is a stated convention rather than a mistake by either of them.

The second is Rahu and Ketu. The lunar nodes wobble, so software must choose between the mean node, which is the smoothed average position, and the true node, which follows the wobble. The two can differ by more than a degree. Neither is wrong; classical tables are mean-node tables, and much modern software is not. We name our choice on the page so that a difference in your Rahu is traceable rather than mysterious.

What the result does and does not mean

These are positions, not findings. A planet in a house is a fact about the sky and about your birth time; what any tradition concludes from that placement is a separate step, taken by a person applying a named rule. This page does not take that step, and a degree on its own carries no verdict about a marriage.

What the table is genuinely good for is settling arguments about inputs. If two readings of your chart disagree, possible causes include the birth time, the place coordinates, the time zone applied, or the ayanamsa — and all four are visible here.

Why is my Moon in a different nakshatra elsewhere?

A boundary case is one possibility. A nakshatra spans thirteen degrees and twenty minutes and the Moon crosses one in roughly a day, so a Moon near the end of a nakshatra can be moved into the next one by a different ayanamsa or by a birth time out by an hour. Check the degree we print: if it is within a few minutes of a boundary, compare the exact inputs and settings. Proximity alone does not prove that either reading used the correct data or calculation.

Does the house column depend on my birth time?

Yes, and more than anything else on the page does. Houses are counted from the ascendant, which moves through the whole zodiac in a day. The sign and nakshatra of a slow planet will survive a rough birth time; its house may not.

Which planets are included?

The seven visible grahas — Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn — and the two lunar nodes, Rahu and Ketu. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are not part of the classical scheme and no koota or dosha rule we apply refers to them.