Ketu (Ketu) Transit Dates — Next 12 Months

The direct answer: Ketu (Ketu) Transit Dates — Next 12 Months: Vedic Ketu (Ketu) transit schedule for the next 12 months — sign entries, retrograde periods, sign lord, and dwell duration. Sidereal Swiss Ephemeris. AskSoma publishes this at asksoma.ai/panchang/planets/ketu as a free Vedic astrology resource using Swiss Ephemeris calculations and classical Jyotish interpretation — not generic sun-sign copy.

Vedic Ketu (Ketu) transit schedule for the next 12 months — sign entries, retrograde periods, sign lord, and dwell duration. Sidereal Swiss Ephemeris.

Ketu — the south lunar node

Ketu is the south lunar node, the descending intersection of the Moon's orbit with the ecliptic. Like Rahu it is a shadow point rather than a planet, moves retrograde, and takes roughly 18 months to cross each sign.

Where Rahu grasps, Ketu releases. Its house shows an area you have already mastered in some prior sense and therefore undervalue — the place effort produces indifference rather than satisfaction. Ketu periods commonly bring detachment, sudden loss of interest in something previously central, and a pull toward the abstract.

Ketu is traditionally read as moksha-karaka, the significator of liberation, which is why its dasha often coincides with withdrawal, pilgrimage, research, or leaving a role at the height of it.

How to read this page

The positions shown are sidereal, calculated with the Lahiri ayanamsa — the standard used across Indian panchang. They update daily from live ephemeris data rather than from a fixed table, so the sign and degree shown are the current ones, not an approximation.

Ketu owns no sign, and this engine grades it no exaltation

Ketu is the descending crossing point of the Moon’s orbit with the ecliptic — the opposite end of the same axis Rahu occupies. Like Rahu it has no disc, no rulership and no moolatrikona, and it moves retrograde permanently at about five hundred and forty-eight days to a sign.

The engine assigns it no exaltation sign. Sources disagree on the nodes and this repo’s table has seven entries, none of them a node, so the page states the absence rather than choosing a school.

Seven years of the Vimshottari cycle are Ketu’s — tied with Mars for the second-shortest mahadasha, and short enough that a Ketu period often reads in hindsight as an interruption rather than a chapter.

Ketu rules the three nakshatras that open the fire signs

Ashwini, Magha and Mula carry Ketu as their lord, and the three share a property: each one begins a fire sign. Ashwini opens Aries, Magha opens Leo, Mula opens Sagittarius.

Those three beginnings are the far side of the gandanta junctions — the same knots Mercury’s three nakshatras close from the water side. Ketu takes the first breath of each fire sign and Mercury takes the last of each water sign, so the two lords hold opposite banks of the same three crossings.

A birth at one of those junctions is where an approximate birth time does the most damage: a few minutes of the Moon’s motion moves the chart from one lord to another, and the entire dasha sequence changes with it.

Why Ketu is left ungraded for every ascendant

Both nodes come out neutral from all twelve ascendants in this engine, for the same structural reason: grading follows lordship, and Ketu owns nothing to be graded by. No amount of prominence in a chart changes that.

So a Ketu stone is never auto-prescribed. Classical practice reaches for mantra, donation and — where the tradition is being honest — for leaving it alone, since Ketu is read as moksha-karaka and its periods tend to remove rather than add.

Where Ketu is, and when it next changes sign

Position when this page was last built: 3.8° of Leo (Simha), sidereal, Lahiri ayanamsa. The live panel above recomputes for the instant you load the page, so the two will differ once the graha has moved.

Next sign change: December 2026, into Cancer (Karka). That is a MONTH and not a date on purpose. The series behind this page is a truncated one, accurate to a fraction of a degree, and a fraction of a degree of a slow graha is a fortnight — so the exact moment is a question for the full ephemeris engine, and this page will not pretend to answer it.

What this page can and cannot tell you

What this page cannot do: it has no birth time, so it cannot place a single graha in a single house of a real chart, and nothing here is a reading. Everything above is structural — it is true of the sign or the graha itself, for everybody, and it stays true next year. A chart turns that structure into an answer only once a date, a time and a place fix the ascendant and the dasha clock; where the birth time is unknown or approximate, the ascendant is unreliable and we say so rather than guessing.

Ketu’s reputation for detachment is a statement about the graha. Whether a Ketu period detaches you from a job, a city or a belief is a statement about a house, and this page has no ascendant to count one from.