Vedic Astrology Calculator: Moon Sign (Rashi) and Nakshatra

How to Use the Vedic Astrology Calculator

Vedic Moon sign calculator: what you get

Enter your birth date, and ideally your birth time and UTC offset, and the calculator works out where the Moon was in the sidereal zodiac. That gives your Vedic Moon sign, called the Rashi, along with your nakshatra, your pada (the quarter of the nakshatra), the nakshatra's ruling planet and the Mahadasha you were born into. It also shows your Western Moon sign and your Vedic Sun sign, so you can compare. It is free, with no sign-up, and it runs in your browser.

Find my Vedic Moon sign without a birth time

The most common search is for a Vedic Moon sign without a birth time. The Moon changes sign about every two and a half days, so for most dates a date alone is enough to narrow it to one or two signs. Leave the time blank and the calculator lists every sign the Moon was in that date. If there is only one, your Moon sign is certain and your birth time does not matter. If there are two, the result tells you when the Moon changed sign, so you can see whether your birth was before or after that moment. Add a UTC offset to limit the check to your own time zone.

Vedic and Western astrology: the main differences

The gap comes from precession. The Earth's axis wobbles over about 26,000 years, so the point where the seasons begin has slid backwards against the stars. Western astrology kept the seasons as its reference. Vedic astrology kept the stars. The gap between them is the ayanamsa, and the Lahiri ayanamsa, the one adopted by the Indian government's calendar reform committee, is about 24 degrees today.

Vedic sun sign calculator and Vedic sun sign dates

Your Vedic sun sign usually differs from your Western sign, because the sidereal signs start about 24 or 25 days later in the calendar. The calculator shows it alongside your Moon sign. This table gives the dates the Sun enters each sidereal sign in 2026, which are also the Hindu solar-month starts known as sankrantis, for example Makara Sankranti in mid-January and Mesha Sankranti in mid-April. A mid-August birthday that is Leo in the Western zodiac is typically Karka (Cancer) in the Vedic one.

Rashi calculator by date of birth and time

People searching for a Rashi calculator, a Vedic zodiac sign calculator or a sidereal Moon sign calculator want the same thing: the sidereal sign the Moon was in. The twelve Rashi names are Mesha, Vrishabha, Mithuna, Karka, Simha, Kanya, Tula, Vrishchika, Dhanu, Makara, Kumbha and Meena, and they correspond to Aries through Pisces in the same order. Rashi is the Sanskrit word for sign. Your Rashi is the sign the Moon was in, measured against the stars.

Nakshatra calculator: all 27 nakshatras and padas

A nakshatra is a lunar mansion. The sidereal zodiac is cut into 27 equal parts of 13 degrees 20 minutes, and the Moon's nakshatra is the one it sat in at birth. Each nakshatra is split into four padas of 3 degrees 20 minutes, giving 108 padas in all. The nakshatra also fixes your starting dasha, because each nakshatra has a ruling planet.

Vimshottari Mahadasha at birth

The Vimshottari dasha is a 120-year cycle of planetary periods. It starts from the Moon's nakshatra at birth: the nakshatra's lord rules the first period, and the planets then follow in a fixed order. Because you are born part-way through your nakshatra, you are also born part-way through that first period. The balance is the share of the nakshatra still ahead of the Moon, multiplied by the planet's years. The calculator gives you the starting Mahadasha and the balance in years, months and days.

Time zone and daylight saving matter more here than for a sun sign

The Moon moves about 13 degrees a day, roughly half a degree an hour, so an hour of error in birth time can move the Moon by half a degree, and a wrong time zone can move it by several degrees. Use the clock time on the birth certificate and the UTC offset that applied at the place and date of birth, including daylight saving. For example, a birth in New York in July is UTC-4, not UTC-5, and a birth in Sydney in January is UTC+11, not UTC+10. India uses UTC+5:30 all year.

What this calculator does not do: lagna, D9, transits and compatibility

A full Vedic chart also needs the rising sign (lagna), which depends on the birth place as well as the time, and the divisional charts such as the navamsa (D9). This page does not compute those. It gives you the Moon-based pieces that need only a date, with a time and an offset for the exact ones. For the Western birth chart, with houses and the rising sign, see the birth chart calculator. For a quick sun sign comparison between two people, the zodiac compatibility calculator works from signs alone. Traditional Vedic marriage matching, called Guna Milan, compares the two Moon nakshatras and is a different method.

What matters in a Vedic Moon sign calculator

The things that matter in a Vedic Moon sign calculator are the ayanamsa it uses, how accurate its Moon position is, a warning when your Moon is near a sign boundary, and what it does with a missing birth time. This calculator shows the Lahiri ayanamsa, its measured accuracy, a boundary warning and a no-time mode.

Using this calculator in the US, UK, Australia and Canada

The Moon's position does not depend on where you live, but the clock time you enter does, so the UTC offset matters. In the US and Canada, use UTC-5 for Eastern Standard Time and UTC-4 for Eastern Daylight Time, with the same one-hour shift for the other zones. In the UK, use UTC+0 in winter and UTC+1 in summer. In Australia, Sydney and Melbourne use UTC+10 and UTC+11 in summer, Brisbane stays on UTC+10, and Perth uses UTC+8. For a birth in India, use UTC+5:30. Day-first date formats are common in the UK, Australia and Canada, and this calculator takes the month by name, so there is no mix-up.

Other birth-date calculators

The zodiac sign calculator gives your Western sun sign with exact sign-change times for birthdays on a sign boundary, and the Chinese zodiac calculator gives your animal and element. The Mayan day sign calculator reads the 260-day Tzolk'in.