Personal Transit Report from Your Moon Sign

What a gochar report is

In Vedic astrology a transit, called gochar, is the sky of today read against your own birth chart. The usual starting point is your Moon sign, the rashi, and the houses are counted from it: the sign the Moon occupied at your birth is the 1st house, the next sign is the 2nd, and so on. The Moon is used because it stands for the mind, and a transit is traditionally read as the way the day feels, more than the way a life turns.

This report concentrates on the four slow planets, since they stay in one sign for months or years and so set the background tone of a period. Saturn spends about two and a half years in a sign, Jupiter about a year, and Rahu and Ketu about a year and a half. The faster planets change sign within weeks and are better followed on the live transits page.

How the report is made

You can pick your Moon sign if you know it, or give your birth details and the tool finds it. If you give a birth date without a time and the Moon changed sign that day, both possible signs are shown, with the time of change. Planet positions come from the Swiss Ephemeris tables on this site, in the sidereal zodiac with the Lahiri ayanamsa and the mean node for Rahu and Ketu.

You also choose the date to look from, which starts as today. For that date the report lists each slow planet’s sign, the house it occupies counted from your Moon, whether that house is among those the gochara tables count as favourable, and any vedha. Vedha is the classical idea of obstruction: a favourable position is said to be held back when another planet stands in a particular paired house. Below that, a short passage in plain words describes each planet in its house, and a dated list shows every sign change and every retrograde or direct turn of Jupiter and Saturn in the following twelve months.

Reading the result

The words favourable and less easy come from the gochara tables of Phaladeepika, the same ones used in the Gochar view of the transits page. Saturn, for example, is counted favourable in the 3rd, 6th and 11th houses from the Moon, and Jupiter in the 2nd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 11th. These are traditional labels for the quality of a phase, and a less easy house is a time for patience and steady effort, not a sentence.

Two things help keep the picture balanced. First, read the whole table together: a less easy Saturn next to a favourable Jupiter is a mixed period, as most periods are. Second, remember that the transit is read against the birth chart and the running dasha. The same Saturn placement feels different for two people, which is why you can look at your dashas with the Mahadasha calculator and your whole chart in the free kundali.

If Saturn is in the 12th, 1st or 2nd from your Moon, the stretch is Sade Sati, and the Sade Sati calculator gives all of its dates. For deeper looks at a single planet, use the Jupiter transit, Saturn transit or Rahu and Ketu transit tools.

Where traditions differ

Teachers disagree about several points, and you should know them. Some read transits from the Lagna as well as the Moon, and weigh the two differently. Some give the Ashtakavarga more weight than the favourable-house tables. The dates of a sign change can differ by a day between sources, and a different ayanamsa moves them by a few days. We use Lahiri, the government of India’s standard. Finally, modern astrologers often place less weight on gochara than older texts do, and more on the dasha.

What it does not do

The report does not predict events, and it does not replace a consultation with a trained astrologer. If a period is hard, speak to people you trust, and to a doctor or counsellor about health or mood. For a reading of how a transit meets your own chart, you can book a consultation.

Frequently asked questions