☽ Free Nakshatra Calculator — Your Birth Star, Pada and Lords

Umbriel's free nakshatra calculator finds your Janma Nakshatra — the lunar mansion your Moon was born into — with its pada, its two lords, its deity and its life-aim, in the sidereal (Lahiri) zodiac. Every other body in your chart gets the same treatment. Free, no account.

• What you'll needBirth date, time and place
• What you getYour Moon's nakshatra with symbol, deity, ruler and meaning; all 27 mansions to read; and a full table giving every planet, the outer planets, Chiron, Lilith and the four angles their own nakshatra, pada, nakshatra lord, pada lord, ruling deity and purushartha
• CostFree — no account required

A nakshatra is the Moon's own zodiac. Where the familiar zodiac divides the circle into twelve signs of 30°, the nakshatras divide it into twenty-seven mansions of 13°20′ each — roughly one day of the Moon's travel. In Jyotish the Moon comes first, so where a Western reading often opens with the Sun, a Vedic one opens here: the sign and the nakshatra your Moon was born into.

Each mansion is quartered into four padas of 3°20′. Your pada is not a decoration — it is the same division as the navamsa, so the sign your pada falls in is the D9 sign, and the ruler of that sign is your pada lord. Umbriel computes it from the actual divisional chart rather than from a second lookup table, which means the two can never disagree with each other.

The other lord is the nakshatra lord, and it is the one that does the most work in a Vedic reading: it seeds the Vimshottari dasha, the sequence of planetary chapters that times a life. Your Moon's nakshatra lord decides which dasha you were born into and how much of it was left to run.

Umbriel gives every body its own row, not just the Moon. The Sun through Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, Chiron, Lilith, Rahu and Ketu, and the Ascendant, Descendant, Midheaven and Imum Coeli — eighteen rows, each with its nakshatra, pada, both lords, the ruling deity and the purushartha, the aim of life that mansion leans toward: Dharma, Artha, Kama or Moksha.

⚠️ The angles are marked as angles rather than quietly listed with the planets. They take a nakshatra like anything else, but they are not grahas, and they never enter the Char Karaka ranking further down the page. And all twenty-seven mansions are readable whether or not they are yours — seeing the other twenty-six is what makes yours mean anything.

The chart is cast sidereally with the Lahiri ayanamsa and whole-sign houses, and the mean lunar node is forced for the duration rather than inherited from the app's own setting, because Jyotish uses the mean node and the two differ by enough to move Rahu across a divisional boundary. Each body's sidereal longitude is divided by 13°20′ to give the mansion and by 3°20′ to give the pada. The nakshatra lord follows the nine-lord Vimshottari cycle repeated three times across the twenty-seven. ⚠️ The PADA lord is not a second lookup table: a pada and a navamsa are the same 3°20′ division, so Umbriel takes the D9 sign from the divisional-chart code the varga grid uses and reads its traditional ruler. Anything else would let the nakshatra table and the varga table on the same page disagree with each other. The purushartha — Dharma, Artha, Kama or Moksha — is a fixed sequence over the twenty-seven that runs forward in fours and then REVERSES, which is why a plain modulo-4 from Ashwini puts Ardra in the wrong aim; the list here was checked row by row against an outside reference table and agrees on every one of them. The four angles are computed and shown with the rest but marked as angles, and they are excluded from the Char Karaka ranking elsewhere on the page, because they are points rather than grahas.