Chitra is the fourteenth nakshatra, spanning the Virgo-Libra boundary from 173 degrees 20 minutes to 186 degrees 40 minutes of the sidereal zodiac, and its star is the brilliant Spica. Its Vimshottari ruler is Mars, its presiding deity is Tvashtar (also called Vishwakarma), the divine architect and craftsman of the gods, and its symbol is a bright jewel or pearl. The name means bright or brilliant. Jyotisha reads Chitra through craftsmanship, design, and dazzling form, the shining thing skilfully made, and classes it as Rakshasa gana. Tvashtar's association makes it a mansion of the maker and the beautiful artifact. These are traditional interpretations laid over Spica, the first-magnitude star that Indian astronomy places at this point and that many ancient calendars used as a seasonal marker.
Chitra's padas run through Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. Tvashtar, also identified with Vishwakarma in later texts, is credited in Vedic and Puranic literature with forging the weapons of the gods and shaping the forms of living beings, a double office as craftsman and as maker of bodies that gives Chitra's association with design and craftsmanship a cosmogonic weight beyond ordinary artisanship. Spica itself is a rotating ellipsoidal binary star system rather than a single star, too close and too fast an orbit to resolve visually, a modern astrophysical fact with no bearing on its ancient role as a harvest marker across Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Indian calendars alike, all of which independently used its heliacal rising or setting to fix agricultural dates.