The 27 nakshatras

What a nakshatra is

The ecliptic is 360°. Divide it into 27 and each segment is 13°20′ — a nakshatra, or lunar mansion. The Moon travels about 13° a day, so it occupies each for roughly twenty-four hours.

Each nakshatra has a ruling graha, assigned in a repeating sequence of nine: Ketu, Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury. That sequence is also what drives the Vimshottari dasha system, which is why the nakshatra of the Moon at birth sets the dasha a chart starts in.

Padas

Each nakshatra divides into four padas of 3°20′. The pada maps to a navamsa sign, so two moments in the same nakshatra can carry different readings. A panchang that gives the nakshatra without the pada has dropped information that classical technique treats as significant.

What can be tested, and what we find

Nakshatra occupancy is a clean, dated condition, which makes it straightforward to test: take every session on which the Moon occupied a given nakshatra and compare the forward returns against an unconditional baseline from the same series.

With 27 nakshatras and several horizons, that is a lot of tests, and some will look significant by chance alone. The workbench applies a Benjamini-Hochberg correction across them and requires at least thirty instances, a confidence interval that excludes zero, and a result that holds on data it was not found in. Most nakshatras do not clear those gates. That is the honest result, and it is reported as such.