The 27 Nakshatras: Full List With Degrees and Ruling Planets

What a nakshatra actually is

A nakshatra is a fixed 13 degree 20 minute slice of the zodiac. Twenty-seven of them tile the full 360 degrees exactly, because 27 times 13 degrees 20 minutes is 360. They are counted from 0 degrees sidereal Aries, so they do not move and they do not depend on your birthplace.

The Moon travels roughly 13.18 degrees a day, which is very close to one nakshatra per day. That is where the system comes from: the nakshatras are the Moon's daily resting places, which is why Arabic astronomy calls its parallel system the lunar mansions and why both traditions have a station for each night of the lunar month.

When someone asks what your nakshatra is, they mean the one containing your Moon at birth. Every other planet also sits in a nakshatra and astrologers read those too, but the Moon's is the one that names you and the one that sets your dasha.

The lord is the part that matters most

Each nakshatra has a ruling planet, and the sequence is fixed: Ketu, Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, repeating three times to cover all 27.

That ruler is not decoration. It decides which Vimshottari mahadasha you are born into. A Moon in Rohini, Hasta or Shravana means you start life in a Moon period. A Moon in Ashwini, Magha or Mula means you start in Ketu's. And how far through the nakshatra your Moon sits decides how much of that first period was already used up before you were born.

The nine lords carry fixed period lengths: Ketu 7 years, Venus 20, Sun 6, Moon 10, Mars 7, Rahu 18, Jupiter 16, Saturn 19, Mercury 17. Add them and you get exactly 120, which is the full Vimshottari cycle. The table below lists the lord and period length for each of the 27, so you can read your starting dasha straight off it.

Reading the table

The degree ranges are absolute, measured from 0 degrees sidereal Aries, and I have written each one against the sign it falls in so you can use it directly against a chart.

Notice that nakshatras do not respect sign boundaries. A sign is 30 degrees and a nakshatra is 13 degrees 20 minutes, so they only line up every third sign. Krittika starts in Aries and finishes in Taurus. Mrigashira starts in Taurus and finishes in Gemini. Nine of the 27 straddle a boundary this way, which is why a planet can be in one sign and share a nakshatra with a planet in the next.

Each nakshatra also divides into four padas of 3 degrees 20 minutes. Padas matter for the Navamsa chart, since each pada corresponds to one navamsa division, which is also why your D9 is so sensitive to birth time.

One caution: all of these are sidereal degrees, using the Lahiri ayanamsha. If you take a Western tropical chart and look up its degrees in this table you will get the wrong nakshatra by roughly two positions.

How to find yours

You need your Moon's sidereal longitude, which means date, time and place of birth, then you look it up in the table.

The good news is that this is the most forgiving thing in a chart. The Moon covers about 13 degrees a day, so it stays in one nakshatra for roughly 24 hours. Unless you were born close to a boundary, even a birth time that is an hour or two out will give you the right nakshatra. Compare that with the Navamsa ascendant, which changes every 13 minutes.

Where the birth time does matter is the dasha. Your starting period is calculated from exactly how far into the nakshatra the Moon had travelled, so an hour of error moves your whole timeline by about 4 percent, which is close to ten months inside a 20 year Venus period. The nakshatra name survives a rough birth time. The dates attached to it do not.