चित्रा
Citrā Nakṣatra
Citrā's deity is Tvaṣṭṛ, the craftsman of the gods — the one who gives things their shape. He fashions each creature inside the womb, and he forged the thunderbolt that Indra carries. The star belongs to him, and so do its people. They are makers, and they are happiest when they take something rough and work it until it is finished and fine.
Chitra sits at an odd place in the zodiac. It starts near the end of Virgo and finishes at the start of Libra, and the line between the two signs falls right at its middle. So the first half of the star is in Virgo, which Mercury rules, where the concern is skill and detail and getting a thing exactly right. The second half is in Libra, which Venus rules, where the concern turns to balance and beauty. Mars rules the whole star and supplies the drive. This is why so many Chitra people end up doing work that has to be correct and good to look at in the same breath — a surgeon, a designer, a jeweller, an architect all live in that overlap.
The star you actually see is Spica, the single bright point in the hand of the maiden Virgo, and in Sanskrit its name is just Chitra, the bright one. It is a blue-white star of the first magnitude, and it happens to sit almost exactly on the path the Sun and Moon travel, which made it useful to the old astronomers as a fixed marker they could measure everything else against. A bright point standing alone on the Moon's road is a fitting sign for this star, because standing out from what is around it is the whole meaning of the word chitra.
Dr Togi, who teaches astronomy on Dr Arjun Pai's panel, gives the star's other job. Under the Lahiri ayanamsha Spica sits at Virgo 29°59′, almost exactly on the line into Libra. That is no accident: Lahiri's ayanamsha is the Chitrapaksha, which fixes the zodiac so that Spica stands opposite the first point of Aries. No bright star marks Aries 0°, so the sidereal zodiac is measured from this one. Spica lies about two degrees south of the Sun's path, and the Sun passes just north of it each year around 17 October. To find it in the sky, follow the curve of the Big Dipper's handle to Arcturus, Svati's star, and carry on to Spica.
Dr Pai adds two points about the star's place. Counting from Ashvini, Chitra is the fourteenth of twenty-seven stars, with thirteen on each side, so it stands at the middle of the circle. It is also one of the stars marked by a single point of light, like Ardra and Svati, and Dr Pai finds that planets in such stars give one sharp, unusual talent. Dr Togi notes that all three Mars stars join an earth sign to an air sign: Mrigashira joins Taurus to Gemini, Chitra joins Virgo to Libra, and Dhanishta joins Capricorn to Aquarius. He reads them as bridges between two worlds.
Two of the rows above come with a warning. The element (Fire) and the direction (West) are listed because the modern handbooks list them, but neither is fixed by a classical text the way the karma class, the body part and the deity are. Chitra does not even appear in the Brihat Samhita's own verse on the stars and their directions. Where a classical source gives a value for Chitra, this article uses it; where only the later tables give it, the value is kept but marked, so it is never mistaken for something the old texts actually say.