Grah Stithi (Planetary Positions)

What is Grah Stithi?

Grah Stithi is the planetary positions table — where each graha actually stood at the moment and place you were born.

If the Lagna chart is the picture, Grah Stithi is the data behind it. The diagram tells you that Venus is in the seventh house; the table tells you Venus is at 13°42′ of Libra, in Swati nakshatra, second pada, star lord Rahu, moving direct. Every judgement in the reading comes from these numbers, so it is worth being able to read them.

The nine grahas

Rahu and Ketu are shadow grahas — chhaya grahas. They are the two points where the Moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic, which is why eclipses happen only when a luminary is near one. They own no sign, and the engine derives Ketu directly as Rahu plus 180°.

Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are available behind a setting, off by default. They carry no classical rulership or dignity, so nothing else in the engine reads them.

Reading the columns

Each row of the table carries the following.

Longitude — the graha’s sidereal ecliptic longitude, from 0° to 360° measured from the start of Aries. This is the underlying number; everything else in the row is derived from it. It is also shown in degrees, minutes and seconds within the sign, which is the form KP tables use.

Sign (rashi) and degree in sign — which of the twelve 30° signs it occupies, and how far into it. The sign lord is the ruler of that sign.

House (bhava) — counted in whole signs from the Lagna’s sign. The house is the sign, so a planet’s house changes only when its sign does.

Nakshatra and pada — which of the 27 lunar mansions it sits in, each 13°20′ wide, and which quarter of that mansion, each 3°20′ wide. See Nakshatra.

Nakshatra lord — the ruler of that mansion, from the nine-lord Vimshottari cycle: Ketu, Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, repeating three times across the 27. The Moon’s nakshatra lord is what starts your Vimshottari dasha.

Star / sub / sub-sub lord — the KP chain. The nakshatra is subdivided in the Vimshottari proportions, then subdivided again, narrowing a planet’s position from a 13°20′ mansion to a band of minutes. The star lord is the same thing as the nakshatra lord. See the KP system.

Retrograde — marked when the graha’s longitude is decreasing, which the engine takes straight from its computed daily speed. Rahu and Ketu are marked retrograde unconditionally; the Sun and Moon never are.

The astronomical columns

Four more numbers ride on every row. They are not read the way a sign or a house is read — no classical rule turns on a planet’s distance — but three of them feed rules the engine already applies, and all four are what you would compare against an ephemeris if you wanted to check the chart’s arithmetic from outside.

Speed — degrees per day, signed. Negative means retrograde, which is where the retrograde flag comes from. The magnitude matters too: a graha moving well below its own average is slow, and slowness near a station is what Cheshta Bala scores. The Moon runs about 13° a day, Saturn about 0.03°.

Ecliptic latitude (śara) — how far north or south of the ecliptic the graha stands, in degrees. This is the graha’s own latitude in the sky; it has nothing to do with the latitude of your birth place, which is a different number in a different table. It is small for everything but the Moon, and the engine uses it to settle graha yuddha — when two grahas are within a degree of each other in longitude, the more northern one wins the war.

Declination (krānti) — how far north or south of the celestial equator the graha stands. Latitude and declination answer the same shape of question against two different reference circles, and they are not interchangeable: the Sun’s ecliptic latitude is always zero, while its declination swings ±23½° over the year and is the reason there are seasons at all. Declination is what Ayana Bala is scored from — a graha in its favoured hemisphere gains strength — and it is what the krāntisāmya reading pairs grahas by, when two stand at equal declination on opposite sides of the equator.

Distance — how far the body actually is from the Earth, in astronomical units (1 AU is the Earth–Sun distance). No classical rule reads it. It is shown because it is the one column that makes the row unmistakably a description of the real sky, and because it is the fastest way to see that the Moon is a quarter of a million miles away while Saturn is nine times further out than the Sun. Rahu and Ketu show no distance at all, and that blank is deliberate: a node is the point where two orbital planes cross, and a crossing is not anywhere in particular. Printing a number there — some software prints the Moon’s — would be inventing a fact.

These four are properties of the body, not of the chart frame, so they are identical in every divisional chart. A varga re-maps which sign a graha counts as occupying; it does not move the graha.

The hora of birth

The vara names the lord of the whole day. The hora names the lord of the hour, and it is the finer of the two.

Horas run from sunrise, not from midnight: twelve equal parts of the daylight, then twelve equal parts of the night, each ruled by a graha stepping through the Chaldean order — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, repeating. The first hora after sunrise belongs to that day’s own vara lord, which is exactly why the days are named as they are: run twenty-four horas forward from the Sun’s and you land on the Moon, which is why Monday follows Sunday.

Two consequences worth knowing. A hora is not sixty minutes — it is a twelfth of the daylight or of the night, so it is longer than an hour in summer daylight and shorter after dark. And a birth between midnight and sunrise falls in the tail of the previous day’s horas, so a 3 a.m. Wednesday birth is running on Tuesday’s sequence. The birth record shows the hora lord and which of the twenty-four the birth fell in, alongside the vara.

Where the numbers come from

Positions are computed with the Swiss Ephemeris, using its Moshier analytical model — sub-arcsecond accuracy for the visible planets, with no external data files to go stale.

They are sidereal: measured from a zero point fixed against the stars rather than the moving equinox. The offset between the two zodiacs is the ayanamsha, and it is the reason a planet that a tropical chart calls Sagittarius is usually Scorpio here. AstroShruti uses Lahiri by default — the Indian civil standard — and supports twenty-six ayanamshas in total, including Raman, KP, True Chitra, Yukteshwar, Surya Siddhanta and Fagan-Bradley. The ayanamsha’s value in degrees at your birth moment is shown with the chart.

Rahu is computed from the mean lunar node by default; the true node is available as a setting. The two differ by up to about a degree and a half, which is usually invisible and occasionally moves Rahu across a nakshatra boundary. If your chart’s Rahu disagrees with another site’s by a small amount, this setting is the first thing to check.

Positions now, not at birth

Grah Stithi describes a moment. Your birth chart freezes that moment; the sky did not stop.

The same table computed for right now is Gochar — the transits. It is the identical calculation with the clock moved forward, and it is read against the natal chart: transiting Saturn over the natal Moon, transiting Jupiter through the natal seventh house, and so on.

What to do with the table

The positions are the input, not the reading. From here:

• Bhaav Nirdeshan — what each house signifies and which grahas speak for it.
• Bala — Shadbala, for whether a well-placed planet is actually strong enough to act.
• Maitri Chakra — natural, temporal and compound friendships, which colour every conjunction in the table.
• Ashtakavarga — the benefic-point score each sign carries.

Notes on this table

• Sidereal longitudes from the Swiss Ephemeris (Moshier); Lahiri ayanamsha by default.
• Nine grahas by default; the three outer planets are optional.
• Ketu = Rahu + 180°, exactly, always.
• Houses are whole-sign from the Lagna’s sign.