Gochar means transit: where the grahas actually are, as opposed to where they were when you were born. The table above gives the current position of all nine, which are retrograde, how fast each is moving, and the exact date each next crosses into a new sign.
It needs no birth details. This is the one page on the site that is identical for everybody, because it describes the sky rather than a person.
What a transit is
Your birth chart is a snapshot. The planets kept moving afterwards.
A transit is simply the current position of a graha, usually considered against something in the natal chart: the natal Moon most often, sometimes the lagna. The tool takes an optional moon sign and reports how many signs each graha currently sits from it.
That relationship is the whole mechanism behind Sade Sati (Saturn in the 12th, 1st or 2nd from the natal Moon) and behind most transit interpretation generally. The positions themselves are astronomy; what gets read into the relationship is not.
The speeds are the useful part
The table reports degrees per day, computed by central difference from the actual ephemeris rather than taken from a table of averages. That means it shows the real current rate, including the slowdown near a retrograde station.
Rough figures worth carrying:
| Graha | Speed | Time per sign |
|---|---|---|
| Moon | about 13° a day | about 2¼ days |
| Mercury | up to about 2° a day | 2 to 3 weeks, when direct |
| Sun | about 1° a day | about a month |
| Venus | about 1° a day | about a month, when direct |
| Mars | about 0.5° a day | about 6 weeks |
| Jupiter | about 0.08° a day | about a year |
| Saturn | about 0.03° a day | about 2½ years |
| Rahu and Ketu | about 0.05° a day, backwards | about 18 months |
That spread is why transit claims need reading with the timescale attached. A Moon transit lasts a couple of days. A Saturn transit lasts years. Both get described in the same language, and they are not the same kind of statement.
There is a second point in the same table, and it is sharper. A transit applies to everyone with that moon sign at once. When Saturn enters a sign, it enters it for every person on Earth simultaneously. Roughly one twelfth of humanity shares any given moon sign, so a transit reading of the form "this will affect you" is describing something happening to about six hundred million people on the same day.
Ingress dates, and why they cannot be projected
The date each graha next changes sign is the part of this page that takes real work, and it is where implementations go wrong.
The obvious approach is to take the graha's current speed, measure how far it is from the sign boundary, and divide. That works for the Sun, which never reverses. It fails for everything else.
A graha near a boundary can cross it, turn retrograde, cross back into the sign it just left, turn direct again and cross a third time. Mercury does this several times a year. Mars did it in 2022. When it happens, a projection reports the first crossing as though it were permanent, and is wrong for months.
This page finds ingresses by scanning forward for an actual change of sign and then bisecting that interval down to one minute. No assumption is made that motion is forward, or steady, or that a boundary once crossed stays crossed.
The scan step is chosen per graha from its speed: a quarter-day for the Moon, three days for Saturn. Stepping a day at a time would miss nothing but would be wasteful for the slow bodies; stepping a month at a time would miss the Moon entirely.
Retrograde motion, and what is really happening
Several grahas are usually marked retrograde. It means they appear to move backwards against the fixed stars.
Nothing physically reverses. The Earth is on a faster inner orbit and periodically overtakes the outer planets, and during the overtaking they appear to slide backwards, exactly as a slower car appears to move backwards as you pass it on a motorway. For Mercury and Venus, which are inside Earth's orbit, the same effect happens when they swing between us and the Sun.
The apparent reversal was one of the harder problems in early astronomy and drove a great deal of increasingly elaborate machinery to explain, all of which dissolved the moment the Sun was put at the centre.
Rahu and Ketu are a different case, and the tool separates them out. Their backward motion is genuine. The lunar nodes really do regress along the ecliptic, completing a circuit in about 18.6 years, because the Moon's orbital plane itself slowly rotates. They are marked permanently retrograde for that reason rather than as an appearance.
One consequence you can see in the table: Rahu and Ketu always change sign on the same day. They are opposite ends of one line, exactly 180° apart, so they cross sign boundaries simultaneously and always will.
Reading the table
A few things the numbers tell you directly.
Which grahas are near a boundary. A graha at 29° of a sign is days or weeks from moving, and any reading built on its current sign has a short shelf life. A graha at 3° has just arrived.
Which are slowing down. A speed well below the graha's usual rate means it is approaching a station, the turning point between direct and retrograde motion. Mercury at 0.3°/day is about to turn.
How long the current arrangement lasts. The nearest ingress date in the table is the date the sky's configuration next changes at all.
Why another site gives different dates
The ayanamsa, and here it matters directly. A sign boundary is an absolute sidereal longitude, so shifting the zero point shifts every boundary. Lahiri and Raman are about 1.45° apart, which for Saturn at 0.03° a day is about seven weeks of difference in when it changes sign. For the Moon it is under three hours. The slower the graha, the larger the discrepancy in time.
Mean against true node for Rahu and Ketu, worth up to about 1.5°, which at their speed is about a month.
First entry against final entry, for a graha that retrogrades back out of a sign after entering it. Both are defensible and they can differ by months.
Tropical against sidereal. Western transit reports use the tropical zodiac and will differ by the whole ayanamsa, currently about 24°, which is nearly a whole sign. That is not a disagreement so much as a different coordinate system.
The one transit everybody can check
If you want to confirm for yourself that the table is describing the real sky rather than a model of it, the Moon is the graha to use.
It moves about 13° a day, which is roughly half a degree an hour, and it changes sign every two and a quarter days. So the ingress date the table gives for the Moon is never more than about two days away, and you can simply come back and see whether it happened.
Better still, the Moon is visible. Its position against the background stars is something you can check with your own eyes and a star chart, unlike Saturn's sidereal longitude to the arcminute. If the tool says the Moon is in Magha nakshatra, that is a claim about which patch of sky it is standing in tonight, and the claim is falsifiable from a rooftop.
That is worth doing once, because it establishes what kind of thing the rest of the table is. The positions are not conventions or interpretations. They are statements about where objects are, of the same type as a tide table, and they are wrong or right in the same way a tide table is.
Sidereal against tropical, briefly
One source of confusion that comes up constantly with transits.
A Western transit report will place the Sun in a different sign from this page, almost always the next one along. Neither is a mistake.
Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, whose zero point is the position of the Sun at the March equinox. Indian astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, whose zero point is fixed against the stars. Because the Earth's axis wobbles, the equinox drifts backwards against the stars by about 50 arcseconds a year, and over roughly two thousand years that has accumulated to about 24°.
So the two zodiacs are currently offset by nearly a whole sign. A tropical Leo Sun is usually a sidereal Karka Sun. Both are computed correctly within their own frame; they are answering questions with different starting points.
The tool reports the offset it used, called the ayanamsa, in the method block below the table. If you are comparing against a Western source, that number is the entire difference between the two.
What this page will not do
It will not tell you what any of these transits mean for you.
What it computes is each graha's sidereal longitude, its sign and nakshatra, its instantaneous speed, and the next instant at which it crosses a sign boundary. All of that is astronomy, checkable against any ephemeris in the world, and none of it depends on who is asking.
The reason to have it stated carefully is that transit interpretation rests entirely on these positions and dates being right, and the ingress dates in particular are easy to get wrong in ways nobody notices. A page that projects Mercury's current speed forward will confidently give you a date that a retrograde loop makes nonsense of. Getting the astronomy right is a precondition for anything built on top of it, whatever you think of what gets built.