Your moon sign, from your birth details

What this tool computes

It works out which of the twelve signs the Moon occupied at the moment of your birth, measured against the sidereal zodiac. That is your rashi, also called the chandra rashi or janma rashi. It is a fact about the Moon. The Sun’s sign at your birth is a separate value, and in Indian practice it is not what the word rashi ordinarily refers to.

Almost every matching rule is computed from this one value

Four of the eight kootas in Ashtakoota read the rashi rather than the nakshatra: varna, vashya, graha maitri and bhakoot. Between them they carry 15 of the thirty-six points. Bhakoot alone carries 7, and it is scored purely on the distance between the two moon signs.

This is the part usually left unsaid. Because bhakoot depends only on that distance, the proportion of pairings that score zero on it is a property of the twelve signs and nothing else: 50% of all possible pairings score nothing there. A bhakoot objection is therefore an extremely common finding, and a report is being straight with you when it says so.

If the rashi on the family paper is wrong, a large share of the score computed from it is wrong too.

What the result means, and what it does not

A rashi is a location, not a verdict and not a character. What this tool gives you is the input that the rules take, computed from planetary positions rather than copied from an almanac. It does not tell you what any tradition concludes from that input, and it does not tell you anything about how a marriage will go. Different schools read the same rashi differently — Raman’s treatment of bhakoot is directional, for instance, where the standard treatment is not, and the two reach opposite conclusions on the same pair of signs.

Is my rashi the same as my star sign?

Usually not. A newspaper star sign is the tropical Sun sign; a rashi is the sidereal Moon sign. Two different bodies, measured against two zodiacs that have drifted roughly twenty-four degrees apart. The two agreeing would be a coincidence rather than a confirmation.

Why does this differ from a rashi I was given elsewhere?

There are three ordinary reasons before anyone has made a mistake. The birth time may have been recorded in local time rather than standard time. The Moon may have been near a sign boundary. Or the earlier calculation may have used a different ayanamsa, which shifts every position slightly. We state which ayanamsa we use, and we say when your Moon sits close enough to a boundary for the question to be live.

Do I need an exact birth time?

Less than you might think. The Moon takes a little over two days to cross a sign, so the date and an approximate hour normally settle it. The exception is a birth in the closing or opening hours of a sign, where the time decides the answer. The tool tells you when yours is one of those, rather than reporting a sign as though the question were closed.