North Node Sign by Birth Date: Rahu and Ketu, 1950–2050

The Moon’s orbit is tilted a little against the Sun’s apparent path, the ecliptic, so twice a month the Moon passes through the plane of that path: once heading north and once heading south. The northbound crossing point is the ascending or north node, which jyotish counts as Rahu; the southbound one, always exactly opposite, is the south node, Ketu. Neither is a body. Each is a direction along the zodiac, and like any longitude it falls in a sign.

That direction drifts backwards through the signs, against the order Aries, Taurus, Gemini, at about 0.053° a day. So a date of birth settles the node’s sign without a birth time on all but a handful of days, and the tables below give every change from 1950 to 2050, dated in Indian Standard Time. Ketu’s sign is always the seventh from Rahu’s, and the tables print both.

Where Rahu and Ketu Are Now

On 28 October 2026 the mean node is in sidereal Aquarius, with Ketu in Leo, as it has been since 18 May 2025. It will move back into Capricorn, and Ketu into Cancer, on 5 December 2026, and on into Sagittarius and Gemini on 24 June 2028. Those are the days the site’s tables give, but both changes fall so near midnight that a slightly different mean-node formula could move them to 6 December and 23 June respectively, and the tables below print each as a pair of dates. These are the same two changes the Rahu–Ketu transit 2026–2028 page follows: the two mean-node rows for Capricorn and Sagittarius in the site’s ingress table match this century table to the stamp.

The true node, defined below, is in Aquarius too and will reach Capricorn on 25 November 2026, 10 days ahead of the mean one. In the tropical zodiac that Western software uses, the mean node is also in Aquarius today and stays there until 7 March 2028. Today’s agreement between the zodiacs is the less usual case, as the section on tropical signs shows.

Mean Node and True Node

A node calculator can mean either of two points, and the name alone does not say which.

• The mean node belongs to an averaged lunar orbit. It slides backwards at an unvarying 0.053° a day and never turns. This page computes it with the same expression that generates the site’s ingress and retrograde tables, and every Rahu and Ketu row in the site’s ingress and conjunction tables carries the mean-node flag.
• The true node, sometimes called the osculating node, belongs to the ellipse that fits the Moon’s actual position and velocity at one instant. Here it comes from the JPL DE421 ephemeris. The Sun’s pull keeps tipping that ellipse, so the true node swings to either side of the mean one, at times moving faster backwards, at times forwards.

Sampled at noon IST on each of 36,890 days from 1950 to 2050, the two points:

The average gap of almost nothing is a check on both computations, since the mean orbit is built as the long-run average of the actual ones; the generator refuses to write its data if that average exceeds 0.05°. The swing around it never reaches 2° but passes 1° on about half of all days, and on about one day in four the true node is running forwards. At its fastest it covers more than four times the mean node’s daily distance. None of that changes the sign on most dates: the two disagree about the sidereal sign on 3.1% of days, roughly one in 32.

Near a Change, the Choice of Node Decides

Those disagreeing days are not scattered. They sit around each change of sign, because the true node reaches a sign line before or after the mean node does. Matching each of the 65 mean-node entries to the true node’s nearest crossing into the same sign, the gap runs from 0 to 34 days and averages 18; the true node gets there first 31 times and second 33 times, and once the two cross on the same day. The widest case in the sidereal table is Scorpio in 2011, which the mean node entered on 6 June 2011 and the true node 34 days earlier. For the coming changes the gap is 10 days in 2026 and 31 days in 2028, the true node first both times.

The true node can also cross a line, turn, and cross back. The mean node changes sidereal sign 65 times in the century; the true node does so 69 times, the four extra crossings coming from two short loops, in 1994 and 2040, each a forward step out of a sign and a backward step into it again. In the tropical zodiac the true node makes 73 crossings, eight more than the mean node. No loop lasts more than 33 days.

Every one of the disagreeing days lies within 34 days of a change in the sidereal table. So for a birth 35 or more days from any change date, mean and true node give the same sidereal sign, and a calculator using the Lahiri ayanamsa should give the table’s sign whichever node it follows. Closer than that, find out which node the calculator is set to before comparing: one that follows the true node may put Rahu in the neighbouring sign.

About 18.6 Months a Sign, 18.6 Years Round

Because the mean node never changes pace, its stays are almost identical: every one from 1950 to 2050, sidereal or tropical, lasts 566 or 567 days, about 18.6 months. Twelve of them make up the full circle of 18.6 years; the matching figures are no coincidence, since a sign is a twelfth of the circle and a month a twelfth of the year. The same 18.6-year turn of the node sets the cycle in how far north and south the Moon swings each month, the subject of the out-of-bounds Moon page.

Sidereal Rahu and the Tropical North Node

Jyotish reads the node in the sidereal zodiac; this page uses the Lahiri ayanamsa, as the rest of the site does. Western astrologers use the tropical zodiac, counted from the March equinox, and call the same point the north node. The two zodiacs stand about one sign apart, a gap the Lahiri ayanamsa page tabulates by year. Because the node moves backwards, it reaches each sidereal sign first and the same tropical sign later: between 438 and 464 days later across the century, about 15 months. As a result the tropical sign is one sign further on from the sidereal sign on 79.6% of days, about four days in five, and the two coincide on the other 20.4%. On no day are they two signs apart. A Western “north node in Aries” and a Vedic “Rahu in Aries” are therefore usually different birth dates.

Rahu and Ketu Sign Dates, 1950–2050 (Sidereal, Mean Node)

Find the row whose span contains the birth date. Each row runs from the IST date the mean node enters a sign to the date it leaves; a birth on the boundary date itself needs the birth time, and software that places the node at that moment. Of the 65 entries, 21 are printed as two dates. At the node’s pace, a mean-node formula that differs from this one by half of a sixtieth of a degree moves the change by nearly four hours, and for those entries that is enough to cross midnight, so either day is possible. The table gives dates only, never a clock time.

Tropical North Node Dates, 1950–2050

The same mean node in the tropical zodiac, for readers checking a Western chart. Read it the same way; 20 of the 65 entries print as two dates.

What This Page Does Not Give

A north node sign is often read as a purpose, a direction or something owed. This page locates the point and stops there. Longitudes and dates can be checked against an ephemeris; a meaning cannot be checked against anything here, so none is offered for any sign. Nor is there a house, which would need the birth time and place, or anything on the nodes’ dignities, aspects or meetings with other grahas. What the texts set out for Rahu in each sign is on the site’s Rahu page, which links a page for every sign.

In Brief

• Now: mean Rahu in sidereal Aquarius, Ketu in Leo, until 5 December 2026; then Capricorn and Cancer
• Pace: 566 or 567 days a sign, always backwards; once round in 18.6 years
• True against mean: never 2° apart; a different sidereal sign on 3.1% of days, all within 34 days of a change
• Tropical: one sign on from the sidereal on 79.6% of days
• Certainty: 21 of 65 sidereal entries could fall on either of two days; dates only

The same kind of date lookup exists for Jupiter and Saturn by birth year, and for the Moon’s far point on the Black Moon Lilith page, which has the same mean-against-true split.