Rohini is the fourth nakshatra, from 40 to 53 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac, within Taurus, and its star is Aldebaran, the red eye of the Bull. Its Vimshottari ruler is the Moon; its presiding deity is Brahma, called here Prajapati, the creator; and its symbol is an ox-cart or chariot. The Moon is held to be exalted near this point, and Rohini is traditionally the Moon's favourite mansion, a well-known myth tells of the Moon's love for Rohini among the daughters of Daksha. Jyotisha therefore reads it as a mansion of growth, fertility, beauty, and material abundance, classed as Manushya gana. The name means the red or growing one. These are interpretive conventions of the tradition; the underlying star, Aldebaran, is a first-magnitude giant that anciently served as a marker across many cultures.
The pada sequence for Rohini runs through Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces, one of the many fixed correspondences that let a jyotishi read a planet's Navamsha placement directly from its exact degree within the nakshatra. Aldebaran itself is not part of the Hyades cluster it appears to sit within, an unrelated foreground star roughly half the distance to Earth that the cluster's stars share, a fact unknown to the ancient compilers but not inconsistent with their treatment of Rohini as a single bright marker rather than a cluster like Krittika. The Daksha myth also explains a persistent minor theme in Rohini's classical delineation, a hint of favouritism and consequent imbalance, since the Moon's excessive devotion to Rohini among Daksha's twenty-seven daughters is the very fault the myth uses to account for the Moon's periodic waning as a curse from the aggrieved father-in-law.