ONE QUESTION · A WORKED CHART
What is my nakshatra?
Start with the Moon's position at the moment of birth: that is what identifies your nakshatra, or birth star, one of 27 zodiac divisions each spanning 13°20′. Think of the zodiac as a long street: the Moon's sign gives the neighbourhood, while its nakshatra gives a more precise address. You need your birth date, time and place to find it.
A family record may call this your janma nakshatra, meaning birth nakshatra. It is useful for more than a character description. In Vimshottari, the planetary-period system, each nakshatra has a period lord. That lord determines which planet's period comes first, while the Moon's exact position determines how much of that period remains. Phaladipika discusses the birth star and starting balance in 19.2–3 and its four quarters in 22.1.
See it in a chart
Example birth: 15 January 1990, 08:30 IST · New Delhi
In the fictional Delhi chart, the Moon is at Leo 19.074608°, in Purva Phalguni's second quarter, called pada 2. Purva Phalguni spans Leo 13°20′ to just before 26°40′, or 133°20′ to 146°40′ measured from the start of Aries. Its period lord is Venus. Here the rising sign, or lagna, is Capricorn. Counting each sign as one house puts the Leo Moon in the eighth house. Venus is retrograde, meaning apparently moving backwards, in Capricorn in the first house with the Sun and Rahu. Another person with the same birth star could have Venus elsewhere.
- Moon longitude
- 139.074608°
- Moon within Leo
- 19.074608°
- Birth nakshatra
- Purva Phalguni
- Pada
- 2
For your own chart
Write down the nakshatra, its quarter and its period lord together. For this chart, that means Purva Phalguni, pada 2, Venus. Then look up Venus's actual placement rather than treating a birth-star description as the whole reading.
Check the birth time carefully if the Moon is near a nakshatra boundary. Treat the birth star as a starting point for reflection, not a complete personality description.
For astrologers: calculation details
Fictional Demo Chart A · 15 January 1990, 08:30 IST (UTC+05:30)
New Delhi, India; 28.6139° N, 77.2090° E
Lahiri sidereal zodiac; mean nodes; whole-sign houses; geocentric geometric positions; Vimshottari with a 365.25636-day year. UTC birth instant: 1990-01-15T03:00:00Z. Reference instant: 2026-09-28T06:30:00Z.
Angles are rounded to six decimal places; arithmetic uses the saved full values. Period boundaries are displayed to the nearest second in IST. These settings describe the calculation, not the precision of a birth record.
Follow the calculation
- Divide the full 360° circle by 27: each nakshatra spans 13°20′. Count from 0° Aries, keeping the unrounded Moon longitude for the boundary check.
- The demo Moon is at 139.074608°. Purva Phalguni begins at 133°20′ and ends just before 146°40′, so this longitude falls inside it.
- The Moon is 5.741275° into that segment. This falls in its second quarter: Purva Phalguni, pada 2.