Find your nakshatra
The Moon's nakshatra at your birth, its pada and its ruling planet — plus the nakshatras of your Sun and your ascendant.
Why the birth star matters
The twenty-seven nakshatras divide the zodiac into arcs of thirteen degrees and twenty minutes each, a division older than the twelve signs in Indian astronomy. Your janma nakshatra is the one the Moon occupied when you were born.
It carries more practical weight than almost any other single point in a chart, because the Vimshottari dasha system starts from it. The lord of your birth star determines which planetary period you were born into and therefore the sequence of periods that follows for the rest of your life.
Each nakshatra is quartered into padas of three degrees twenty minutes, and the Moon crosses a full nakshatra in roughly a day. A birth time wrong by an hour will rarely change the nakshatra, but it can easily change the pada.
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