The twenty-seven nakshatras, their ganas and their working classes

By Savan Vyas · Reviewed against the AskSoma timing engine · Updated July 2026

The star the Moon is crossing today, with its gana — the star in force at New Delhi sunrise on 31 July 2026 is Dhanishta — Rakshasa gana, Movable class in the table below.

Twenty-seven equal thirteen-degree twenties

The sidereal zodiac is divided twice over. Into twelve signs of thirty degrees, which is the familiar division, and into twenty-seven nakshatras of thirteen degrees and twenty minutes each, which is the older one and the one muhurat actually runs on. The Moon crosses roughly one nakshatra a day, and the star it is in at sunrise is the star the day is named for.

Each nakshatra has a presiding deity, a ruling planet in the Vimshottari scheme, a symbol and a set of qualities, but for timing purposes two groupings matter above all the rest. The first is the gana — the temperament group. The second is the activity class, which sorts the stars by the KIND of work they suit. Almost every electional rule you will meet is expressed in one of those two vocabularies.

The two groupings answer different questions and are frequently confused. Gana is chiefly a compatibility idea, used when two people are being matched. The activity class is an electional idea, used when a day is being chosen for a task. A star can be gentle in temperament and still be the wrong class for the work you have in mind.

The full table

The activity classes below are the same ones this site’s date scorer uses, so the copy and the code cannot drift apart. Fixed stars suit permanent works, movable stars suit anything that must travel, soft stars suit gentle and ornamental acts, swift stars suit quick and mechanical ones, and the sharp and fierce stars are set aside from ordinary beginnings — which is precisely why they are the correct stars for cutting, ending and confronting.

All twenty-seven nakshatras, by gana and activity class
#	Nakshatra	Gana	Activity class
1	Ashwini	Deva	Swift
2	Bharani	Manushya	Fierce
3	Krittika	Rakshasa	Mixed
4	Rohini	Manushya	Fixed
5	Mrigashira	Deva	Soft
6	Ardra	Manushya	Sharp
7	Punarvasu	Deva	Movable
8	Pushya	Deva	Swift
9	Ashlesha	Rakshasa	Sharp
10	Magha	Rakshasa	Fierce
11	Purva Phalguni	Manushya	Fierce
12	Uttara Phalguni	Manushya	Fixed
13	Hasta	Deva	Swift
14	Chitra	Rakshasa	Soft
15	Swati	Deva	Movable
16	Vishakha	Rakshasa	Mixed
17	Anuradha	Deva	Soft
18	Jyeshtha	Rakshasa	Sharp
19	Mula	Rakshasa	Sharp
20	Purva Ashadha	Manushya	Fierce
21	Uttara Ashadha	Manushya	Fixed
22	Shravana	Deva	Movable
23	Dhanishta	Rakshasa	Movable
24	Shatabhisha	Rakshasa	Movable
25	Purva Bhadrapada	Manushya	Fierce
26	Uttara Bhadrapada	Manushya	Fixed
27	Revati	Deva	Soft

Nine stars in each gana, by construction. The activity classes are unevenly sized on purpose — there are only four fixed stars, which is why griha pravesh and other permanence rites have so few strong dates in a year.

What gana is for, and what it is not for

Gana sorts the twenty-seven into deva (divine), manushya (human) and rakshasa (demonic) temperaments — a vocabulary that reads harshly in English and means something milder in practice: refined, ordinary and forceful. Its main use is in matching two charts, where it contributes points in the Ashtakoota scheme and where a deva-rakshasa pairing is flagged as the difficult combination and a same-gana pairing as the easy one.

It is worth being clear about the limits of that. Gana is one of eight factors in the matching scheme, worth six points out of thirty-six, and a low score on it is a discussion rather than a conclusion — several classical cancellation rules can neutralise the defect entirely when the Moon signs or the lords agree. Anyone told that a whole match fails on gana alone is being told less than the tradition actually says.

For electional work, gana carries far less weight than the activity class. A rakshasa-gana star is not disqualified from an ordinary beginning; three of them, Chitra and Vishakha and Krittika, appear regularly in perfectly respectable muhurat lists. What disqualifies a star from a beginning is being sharp or fierce, and that is a different column of the table.

How the classes decide a date

Read the table as a matching exercise. Something meant to stay — a marriage, a house entry, a deed, a planting — wants the four fixed stars: Rohini, Uttara Phalguni, Uttara Ashadha, Uttara Bhadrapada. Something meant to move — a journey, a vehicle, a relocation — wants the movable group. Something delicate — ornaments, learning, clothes, a first feeding — wants the soft stars. Something quick and technical wants the swift ones.

The inversions are the proof that this is a real system rather than a good-day ranking. Magha and Mula are barred from almost every beginning on this site, and the marriage texts reclaim both outright. Ardra, Ashlesha and Jyeshtha are barred everywhere and are among the correct stars for a procedure whose purpose is to cut. If a source tells you a star is simply auspicious or simply inauspicious, without naming the act, it has flattened the tradition.

One honest caveat about the table itself: classifications differ slightly between texts, particularly for Krittika and Vishakha, which some lineages place in the sharp group rather than the mixed one. This site follows the Muhurta Chintamani lineage as commonly printed, and states which stars each occasion reclaims on the occasion’s own page rather than hiding the decision in a lookup.

A last observation about scarcity, since it explains a good deal about printed muhurat lists. Because there are only four fixed stars, the Moon spends roughly four days a month in one of them, and any rite that wants permanence is competing for those days against the tithi rules, the weekday bars and the season. Rites that want movement or speed have far more room, because the movable and swift groups together cover eight of the twenty-seven. The uneven sizes of the classes are the quiet reason some occasions have dozens of open dates a year and others have a handful.

Rule of thumb: Ask what the act wants to DO, then pick the class that does it: stay put, move, stay gentle, move fast, or cut. Gana is for matching two people; the activity class is for choosing a day. Mixing the two is the most common self-taught mistake in muhurat.

Frequently asked questions

My birth star is a rakshasa gana one. Is that a problem?

On its own, no. Gana describes a temperament rather than a quality, and nine of the twenty-seven stars fall in that group, including several the tradition holds in very high regard. It becomes a discussion point in chart matching, where it is one of eight factors and where several classical rules can cancel the defect outright when other agreements are present.

Why does the Moon sometimes stay in one nakshatra for two days?

Because the Moon’s speed varies between roughly eleven and fifteen degrees a day, so crossing a thirteen-degree-twenty-minute segment takes anywhere from about twenty hours to about twenty-six. When a slow crossing straddles two sunrises, both days are labelled with the same star — and the mirror case, where a fast crossing fits entirely between two sunrises, drops a star from the calendar altogether.

Related guides

How this guide is maintained

Everything computed on this site â the sunrise and sunset behind every window on this page, and the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana behind the date tables â comes from a Lahiri sidereal ephemeris and a NOAA sunrise model applied to the exact coordinates of the city shown, with New Delhi as the reference city for anything not city-specific. Where this guide describes a rule that genuinely varies between texts, regions or family traditions, it says so in the paragraph rather than picking a side quietly, and where the site’s own date scorer takes a documented shortcut, the shortcut is named.

What no guide on this site can do is weigh your own chart. The tables here are a panchang shortlist — the classical tests a calendar can settle — and the personal layer that decides between the surviving dates is a separate step. Start with the occasion pages for computed dates, and see how we compute muhurat for the full method.

Written and maintained by Savan Vyas. A rule applied wrongly here is a bug, and corrections are genuinely welcome.

For a full personalised muhurat matched to your own birth chart, ask Soma on AskSoma.