True Ketu Rashi & Nakshatra Peyarchi — 2025
☋Also known as Ketu Peyarchi, Ketu Gochar, or the nodal axis transit.
Every Ketu sign visit AND every Nakshatra visit for 2025 on one page — with pada timings and nested peak-dignity events. Use the arrows to view any past or future year.
Note: All calculations use Lahiri Ayanamsa (sidereal) and Swiss Ephemeris for high precision, using the true node rather than the mean node. Times are displayed in your local timezone. Ketu and its opposite point Rahu sit exactly 180° apart at every instant and move backwards continuously at about 0.05° per day, taking roughly 18 months to cross a sign and around seven months to cross a Nakshatra. They are permanently retrograde and are never combust, so no motion or combustion state is shown.
About Ketu Peyarchi 2025 (Sign & Nakshatra)
Ketu Peyarchi — what this timeline shows
This page carries the complete Ketu calendar for the year: every sign change in the first section and every nakshatra change in the second, with pada-level timings.
Both sections show both ends of the axis on every card, because Ketu and Rahu move as one. The same calendar is known as Ketu Peyarchi (Tamil), Ketu Gochar (Hindi), or the nodal axis transit.
True Ketu, not Mean Ketu
Every date here is computed from the true Ketu — taken exactly 180° from the true Rahu, the actual instantaneous point where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic — and never from the smoothed mean node. The true node oscillates around the mean by up to about 1.5°; on 1 January 2026 the two stood 1.21° apart.
Because the nodes cover only about 19.35° in a year, that small gap becomes a large difference in dates — measured at 32 days for the 2026 Dhanishtha ingress on the Rahu end of the axis. Many Indian panchangs publish mean-node figures, so if a date here sits a few weeks away from your almanac, that difference in method is almost always the reason rather than an error. The same true-node basis runs through the birth charts, Dashas and every other Ketu figure on this site, so all surfaces agree with each other.
Why both journeys share one page
Ketu takes about 18 months to cross a sign and roughly eight months to cross a nakshatra. A single year therefore holds at most one sign change and two or three nakshatra changes. Split across two pages, each would read as nearly empty — so both live here, as they do for Jupiter and Saturn.
The axis shift
The event most often searched for is the Rahu–Ketu axis shift — the moment the pair moves into a new sign pair. Because they are locked in opposition, both ends change at the same instant: a shift from Aquarius–Leo to Capricorn–Cancer relocates the whole karmic axis in one move. Each shift appears as a new card in the sign timeline with its exact time. Note that sign shifts happen together, but nakshatra changes do not — 27 is an odd number of nakshatras, so 180° spans 13.5 of them, and Ketu crosses its own nakshatra boundaries independently of Rahu.
What the cards do and do not show
Each sign card carries a peak-dignity sub-event when one falls inside the visit: Ketu is exalted in Scorpio (peak 20°) and debilitated in Taurus, with Rahu taking the mirror position.
There are no retrograde or combust sub-events, and no dignity filter chips. Ketu is treated as permanently retrograde and is never combust, so no such window is listable; and with so few cards in a year, filtering would hide more than it reveals.
The three Ketu-owned Nakshatras
In the classical Vimshottari Dasha order, three Nakshatras have Ketu as their ruling planet — called “Ketu-owned Nakshatras” here:
- Ashwini (अश्विनी) —
- 0°00′ to 13°20′ Aries.
- Deity: the Ashwini Kumaras, twin physicians of the gods.
- Associated with speed, healing and fresh starts. Ketu in Ashwini sharpens instinct and quick recovery.
- Also one of the six Gand Mool Nakshatras.
- Magha (मघा) —
- 0°00′ to 13°20′ Leo.
- Deity: the Pitris, the ancestors.
- Associated with lineage, inherited authority and the throne. Ketu in Magha turns attention to ancestry and what was handed down.
- Also a Gand Mool Nakshatra.
- Moola (मूल) —
- 0°00′ to 13°20′ Sagittarius.
- Deity: Nirriti, goddess of dissolution.
- Its name means “root”; associated with uprooting, investigation to the source, and endings that clear the ground.
- Also a Gand Mool Nakshatra.
Because the Vimshottari lords repeat every ninth Nakshatra, a lord’s three sit exactly 120° apart — a trine. Ketu’s three all fall in fire signs, and each is the first Nakshatra of its sign. That is exactly what makes all three Gand Mool: each opens a fire sign immediately after a Mercury-owned Nakshatra has closed a water sign (Revati→Ashwini, Ashlesha→Magha, Jyeshtha→Moola), and those six junctions are the Gand Mool points. Note that the nodes own Nakshatras even though they rule no rashi — which is why these cards carry a Nakshatra-lord badge but never an own-sign or mooltrikona dignity. A lord owns only three of the 27, so many years contain no such visit at all; when one does fall in the year shown, the Nakshatra timeline below marks it with a ☋ Ketu-owned badge and a subtle stone card tint.
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