Choose a month from January 1900 to December 2074, your town and the time of day above, and this free tool makes a sidereal ephemeris for that month: the sign, degree and minute of every graha on every day, with a mark where a planet is retrograde, the Moon’s nakshatra and pada, and the day’s ayanamsa. Below the table it lists the month’s sign changes, retrograde and direct stations, and new and full moons in your local time. The whole sheet prints on one landscape A4 page.
How it works
The positions come from the NASA JPL DE440 tables this site uses for every chart: each planet once a day and the Moon every six hours from 1899 to 2075, filled in between by interpolation. The zodiac is sidereal with the Lahiri ayanamsa, Rahu is the mean lunar node and Ketu is the point opposite it. The tool reads each row at the moment you choose: midnight, sunrise or noon at your town, or 00:00 Universal Time, which is 5:30 am in India and one of the times the month table on the transits page offers. The month’s events are the exact moments worked out in advance for the transits page, so this sheet and that page agree.
We checked the table against an independent calculation (the Swiss Ephemeris, sidereal Lahiri, mean node) for 1,425 rows in 48 test tables, from January 1900 to December 2074 and at places from Fiji to London. The largest difference was 2.3 arcseconds, for the Moon; every retrograde mark, every nakshatra and pada of the Moon and all 255 events in those months were the same, and the ayanamsa agreed to 0.15 arcsecond. The methods are on the accuracy page.
Reading the result
Each cell gives the degree and minute within the sign and the sign itself, for example 7°12′ Sco for 7 degrees 12 minutes of Vrishchika. The minutes are cut, not rounded, the way a panchang prints them, so a planet at 7 degrees 12 minutes 59 seconds shows as 7°12′. The key to the sign abbreviations is printed at the foot of the sheet. An R after a position means the planet is retrograde that day. The Sun and Moon are never retrograde, and Rahu and Ketu move backwards all the time in the mean-node reckoning, so they carry no mark. With sunrise chosen, each row also shows the time of sunrise.
The list under the table gives the date and local time of each event: a planet entering a sign (the Moon does so many times a month), a planet turning retrograde or direct and where it stands, and each new and full moon.
Where traditions differ
An ephemeris is only as Vedic as its ayanamsa. This table uses Lahiri, the Indian standard; KP and Raman shift every position by a fixed amount on a given date, which the ayanamsa comparison shows. Some astrologers use the true node for Rahu and Ketu rather than the mean node used here, and printed ephemerides differ in the time of day they tabulate, which is why the tool lets you choose it. Western ephemerides are tropical, and their positions are larger by the ayanamsa.
What it does not do
It gives positions, not readings: to see what a planet’s place means for you, use the planet position calculator for your birth chart or the personal transit report for today. It does not tabulate declination or houses. For a year of sign changes at once, use the planet sign change dates tool.
Frequently asked questions
↳ What is a sidereal ephemeris?
It is a table of where the planets are on each day, measured in the sidereal zodiac that Vedic astrology uses, which is fixed against the stars. A tropical ephemeris, used in Western astrology, measures from the spring equinox instead, and its figures are larger by the ayanamsa.
↳ Which ayanamsa does the table use?
Lahiri (Chitrapaksha), the Indian standard and the default of this site. Its value for each day is in the last column. The ayanamsa comparison tool gives KP, Raman and True Chitrapaksha for any date.
↳ Why choose midnight, sunrise, noon or Universal Time?
In our test tables the Moon moved between 11.8 and 15.3 degrees a day, about a degree every two hours, so the time of day changes its figure noticeably. Choose the time that matches the ephemeris you compare with, or sunrise for panchang work at your town.
↳ What does the R mean?
The planet is retrograde that day: seen from the Earth it appears to move backwards through the signs. The list under the table gives the moment it turns retrograde and the moment it turns direct again.
↳ Can I print it?
Yes. Press the print button above the table; the sheet prints on its own on one landscape A4 page, with the event list and the key.
↳ How accurate is it?
The positions agree with an independent calculation to within a few arcseconds in our tests, far less than the one minute of arc the table prints. A figure that sits right on a minute boundary can show one minute apart from another program.