Grah aur Upgrah Mein Antar: Planet, Satellite, Graha

The word grah does two jobs in Hindi. In a science textbook it means a planet, and its partner word upgrah means a satellite. In jyotish it is the Sanskrit graha, and the list of nine grahas includes the Sun, which is a star, and the Moon, which is a satellite. Neither usage is wrong; they are two vocabularies that happen to share a word. This page sets out the textbook answer first, then the jyotish one, and then puts the nine grahas into a single table so the two can be read side by side.

Grah aur Upgrah Kise Kahate Hain? (ग्रह और उपग्रह)

In astronomy a planet (grah) is a large body that travels around the Sun. It makes no light of its own; what we see is sunlight reflected off it. A satellite (upgrah) is a body that travels around a planet. The Moon is Earth’s natural satellite, and the machines launched to circle the Earth are called artificial satellites, kritrim upgrah, for the same reason. A star (tara) is different again: it shines by its own light, and the Sun is one.

The two differences a school question usually asks for:

• What it goes around. A grah goes around the Sun. An upgrah goes around a planet.
• How it reaches the Sun. A grah orbits the Sun directly. An upgrah is carried around the Sun only by way of its planet, travelling with it.

What the two share is just as worth knowing: neither gives off light of its own. That is why the Moon can be bright in the night sky without being a star.

Grahon ki Sankhya: Eight, Nine or Seven?

“Grah kitne hote hain” has three correct answers, depending on who is counting.

• Eight, in astronomy. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Pluto was counted as the ninth until 2006, when the International Astronomical Union reclassified it as a dwarf planet.
• Nine, in jyotish. The navagraha: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Rahu and Ketu. The site’s planets hub has a page for each.
• Seven, for sign rulership. In the site’s planet table, seven of the nine own at least one sign, the Sun through Saturn. For Rahu and Ketu the entry begins “None”. That is why tables of exaltation and own signs on this site, like the uchcha grah page, list seven rows.

Two lists, two sets of omissions. The jyotish list leaves out Earth, because a horoscope is drawn from the Earth: it records where everything else stands as seen from the place of birth, and the Earth has no position in its own sky. It also leaves out Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. If a chart shows them as Ur, Ne and Pl, it came from software that adds them; the kundli symbols page explains those labels. The astronomy list, for its part, has no room for the Sun, the Moon, Rahu or Ketu.

The Nine Grahas, Sorted by What They Are

In Sanskrit usage, graha comes from a root meaning to seize or to grasp, which is a long way from the astronomer’s idea of a planet. The table puts the two views together. The third column is the astronomy; the fourth marks the five that jyotish groups as tara grahas; the last two are counted on the site’s station table for 2026 to 2028, computed from the JPL DE421 ephemeris. Dates are days only, and sources can differ by a day on a station that falls close to midnight.

Read down the third column and the nine grahas fall into four kinds: one star, one satellite, five planets and two points. The five planets are exactly the five tara grahas, and they are also the only bodies in the table that ever station.

Surya, Chandrama and Budh: Grah, Upgrah or Tara? (सूर्य ग्रह है या तारा)

• Surya grah hai ya tara? In astronomy, the Sun is a star, the one the planets travel around. In jyotish it is the first of the nine grahas, Surya (सूर्य).
• Chandrama grah hai ya upgrah? (चंद्रमा ग्रह है या उपग्रह) In astronomy, the Moon is an upgrah, Earth’s natural satellite. It is not a tara either, since its light is reflected sunlight. In jyotish it is a graha, Chandra (चन्द्र), the second of the nine.
• Budh grah hai ya upgrah? Mercury is a planet in both vocabularies: a grah of the Sun in astronomy, and Budh (बुध), one of the five tara grahas, in jyotish. It is not anyone’s satellite.

So the short answer to all three is that in jyotish they are all grahas, and the astronomical label is a separate question. The Sun and Moon pages give each one’s entry in the planet table.

Rahu and Ketu: Grahas With No Body

The last two rows of the table are neither planets nor satellites. The planet table describes Rahu as “Shadow malefic — a chhaya graha with no body, no light and no sign of its own”, and its short entry for Ketu reads “Malefic (shadow)”, with the longer entry calling it “the headless one”. Both are lunar nodes. The Moon’s path around the sky is tilted slightly against the Sun’s apparent path, the ecliptic, so the two circles cross at two opposite points. Rahu is the point where the Moon crosses the ecliptic going north, in the table’s own words, and Ketu is the opposite crossing, the south node.

Because there is no body to observe, the site does not take the nodes from the ephemeris that fixes the other seven. The ingress table calls their positions “an analytic formula rather than an ephemeris quantity” and flags every node row as a mean node, and pages here print no clock time for a node event. For what the traditions say about where the nodes are exalted, see the Rahu-Ketu uchch-neech page.

Kaun Sa Grah Ulta Ghumta Hai?

No planet actually reverses in its orbit. Retrograde, vakri, is a matter of how the motion looks from Earth: the site’s retrograde table defines a station as “the instant a planet’s apparent motion reverses”. With that understood, the station table gives a clear answer for the three years it covers.

• The five planets go retrograde, each at its own rate. Between them they have 17 retrograde stations from 2026 to 2028. Mercury has the most, nine, three in each year; Mars has the fewest, one.
• Three are retrograde as this page is published. On 26 October 2026, Mercury, Venus and Saturn are all retrograde. Mercury turns direct on 13 November 2026, Venus turns direct on 14 November 2026 and Saturn turns direct on 11 December 2026.
• The Sun and the Moon never do. Neither appears in the station table, and none of their rows is marked retrograde.
• Rahu and Ketu always do. All thirteen of their rows in the ingress table, sign changes and nakshatra crossings together, are marked retrograde, and the planet table says the nodes “always move retrograde”. The mean node has no station at all: it runs backward the whole time.

So the answer to “kaun sa grah ulta ghumta hai” is Rahu and Ketu always, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn from time to time, and the Sun and Moon never. Every window with its dates is on the retrograde calendar, the 2026 retrograde dates page lists that year’s windows, and the retrograde checker answers the question for any date.

Tara Graha: The Five Star-Like Grahas

Jyotish has its own word that sounds like the astronomer’s tara. The tara grahas are Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn: the five that show in the night sky as points of light, set apart from the two luminaries and the two nodes. The site’s retrograde table calls them, in the astronomer’s terms, “the five visible planets”. The site’s yoga code keeps exactly these five for the yogas that look at the signs either side of the Moon or the Sun, and the graha yuddha page counts planetary war only between pairs of them. A tara graha is not a tara, a star: it is the same set as the five planets in the table above.

Upagraha in Jyotish: Gulika and Mandi

The word upgrah has a second life inside jyotish too, and it has nothing to do with moons. The Gulika and Mandi page describes Gulika and Mandi as upagrahas, sub-planets that Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra sets out alongside the grahas. Like Rahu and Ketu they have no body in the sky; unlike them, they are found from the clock. The day and the night are each cut into eight parts, one part falls to Saturn, and the point is the ascendant at a moment inside that part. That page works the arithmetic and records the two places where traditions disagree over it. This page names no other upagraha, since no other one has a page or a table on this site.

What This Page Does Not Do

Everything above is classification and counting: what each graha is in the sky, and when the station table has it turning. None of it is a reading. The page does not say what a retrograde graha means for anyone, does not time any event in a life, and does not read any chart, including yours. If you are new to the subject, the beginner’s guide introduces the nine grahas, the signs and the houses in order.