Star
Spica
Spica is the brightest star in Virgo, a blue-white star close to the Sun's path. The name is Latin for an ear of wheat, and in 2026 it sits at 24 degrees of the sign Libra.
Where the name comes from
Spica is Latin for an ear of wheat, the sheaf of grain held by Virgo, the harvest maiden. It is the one bright star in a fairly dim constellation, a clean blue-white point low in the spring and summer sky.
The star that revealed a wobble
Spica has a quiet place in history. Comparing its position over centuries helped the ancient astronomer Hipparchus discover that the whole sky slowly shifts, the long wobble of Earth’s axis we now call precession. A single star, watched patiently across lifetimes, revealed a motion no one had ever noticed.
Hali’s own star positions show the same drift. Spica’s tropical position moved from about 202.8 degrees in 1926 to 204.2 degrees in 2026, a shift of 1.403 degrees in a century, or one degree every 71.3 years.
What kind of star it is
Spica looks like one star but is two hot blue stars orbiting each other so closely, in only about four days, that they pull each other into egg shapes. The catalogue Hali uses gives the pair a combined brightness of about magnitude 1.0.
How to find it
From the northern hemisphere Spica is a spring and early summer star, low in the south in the evening. It sits close to the ecliptic, so the Moon passes near it every month, and in some years it slides right in front of it. From the southern hemisphere it rides much higher.
Spica in a chart
By Hali’s 2026 star positions Spica sits at 24 degrees of the sign Libra, the same degree as Arcturus, and the Sun reaches it around 17 October each year. Ptolemy gave Spica the nature of Venus with a little Mars, and it is one of the fifteen Behenian stars. It has a long reputation as one of the most fortunate stars in the sky, and astrologers who use fixed stars read a planet or angle close to it as a gift or talent that seems to arrive from nowhere.
Common confusions
Spica is not in the sign Virgo, though it is the brightest star of the constellation Virgo. Precession has carried it into the sign Libra. And in the Vedic zodiac it is defined as the start of Libra, so two astrologers can both put it in Libra while meaning quite different things. The sidereal versus tropical guide explains the two systems.
Questions
How do I find Spica?
Follow the curve of the Big Dipper's handle to the orange star Arcturus, then keep going in the same arc to the blue-white star Spica. Stargazers say "arc to Arcturus, then speed on to Spica".
Why does Spica matter to Vedic astrology?
The most widely used sidereal zodiac in India, the Lahiri system, is defined so that Spica sits at 0 degrees of Libra. The gap between that and Spica's tropical position, about 24 degrees in 2026, is the difference between the Vedic and Western zodiacs.
Sources: Standard stellar references. Hali star positions for 2026, from Yale Bright Star Catalogue coordinates.