Choghadiya Periods

Choghadiya in depth: where the table comes from and how to read it

The calculator above gives you sixteen named windows for a date. This section explains what stands behind them: which classical idea the eight-part day belongs to, exactly how the engine cuts the day and names each part, what every field in the result means, and where the method stops being useful. Nothing here depends on a birth chart. Choghadiya describes a day at a place, and two people standing in the same town on the same date get the same table.

The classical background, and an honest note on sources

The source texts this app's astrology is built from, listed on the sources page, do not contain a choghadiya table. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, Saravali and the Bhrigu Sutras are texts about birth charts. The choghadiya belongs to the panchang tradition, the almanac of the day, and reaches most people through printed and published almanacs rather than through a chapter and verse. So this page does not pretend to quote a sloka for it. The table the engine uses is pinned, name for name, against a published almanac, and the test that holds it there is described further down.

What the classical texts do contain is the machinery the choghadiya is built from, and that is worth seeing because it shows the table is not arbitrary. Three pieces of BPHS line up with it closely.

An eight-part day already exists in BPHS

BPHS Ch. 3, in the notes on the five Kaal Velas (Kaal, Mrityu, Ardhaprahar, Yamaghantak and Gulik), describes the method in these terms: the duration of the day is divided into eight equal parts; the first part is given to the lord of the weekday; the remaining parts follow in order; and for the night the parts are allotted in a different order, the first going to the lord of the fifth weekday counted from the day in question. That is the same skeleton the choghadiya uses: eight equal parts of the daylight, eight of the night, the weekday lord opening the day, and the fifth weekday's lord opening the night.

The two systems are not identical, and the differences should be stated rather than blurred. In the Kaal Vela scheme the parts follow the plain order of the weekday lords and the eighth part is left without a lord. In the choghadiya the parts follow the hora order instead, and the eighth part repeats the first. The Kaal Velas are also used differently, as sensitive points in a birth chart rather than as good or bad hours. The shared structure is the point here, not a claim that one is the other.

The hora order

BPHS Ch. 27, describing Hora Bala, gives the rule for planetary hours: the first hora of a day belongs to the lord of that day, and each following hora belongs to the lord of the sixth weekday counted from the one before. Start from the Sun and count that way and you get Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, then the Sun again. This is the order the day choghadiya walks, as the next section shows, and it is the same cycle the hora calculator uses for its twenty-four hourly lords. The same chapter adds a remark that matters for any sunrise-based timing: horas are to be calculated for local time, not for the standard time of a clock zone.

Which grahas are counted as gentle and which as harsh

BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 11 sorts the grahas: the Sun, Saturn, Mars, the waning Moon, Rahu and Ketu are malefics, and the rest are benefics, with Mercury turning malefic when it joins one. Each choghadiya name is tied to one of the seven visible grahas, and the three names the tradition avoids are exactly the three that belong to the grahas BPHS calls malefic outright: the Sun, Mars and Saturn. The four names that are not avoided belong to the Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. The grading of the windows therefore follows a classification the texts do state, even though the texts do not apply it to hours of the day in this form.

The seven names, their grahas and their grades

There are seven names and sixteen slots, so names repeat. Each name carries one fixed grade in the engine, and that grade never changes with the weekday, the season or the place. The table below is the whole of it. The meanings in the second column are the ordinary sense of each word; the graha and the grade are exactly what the code holds.

Two things in this table are worth a second look. First, there is exactly one excellent name and one neutral name; everything else is either good or avoid. Chal, the Venus slot, is graded neutral here rather than good even though BPHS counts Venus among the benefics. The name means moving, and the engine treats it as neither recommended nor warned against. Second, the names Rog and Kaal are words, not forecasts. A Rog window does not mean anyone falls ill in it, and a Kaal window is not dangerous. They are labels in a scheduling convention, and this app reports them as such. Nothing here is medical advice.

How the engine names the sixteen slots

The naming needs only one input: the weekday. From it the engine looks up which name opens the day and which opens the night, then walks a fixed cycle from that point, one name per slot, for eight slots. Since each cycle has seven names, the eighth slot always carries the same name as the first.

By day: hora order from the weekday's own lord

The day cycle is Udveg, Chal, Labh, Amrit, Kaal, Shubh, Rog. Read as grahas that is Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the hora order from BPHS Ch. 27. The day opens on the name belonging to the weekday's own lord: Sunday on the Sun's Udveg, Monday on the Moon's Amrit, and so on.

By night: five weekdays at a time

The night cycle is a different order: Shubh, Amrit, Chal, Rog, Kaal, Labh, Udveg. As grahas that is Jupiter, Moon, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Mercury, Sun, or as weekdays Thursday, Monday, Friday, Tuesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Sunday. Each is the fifth weekday counted from the one before it. The night opens on the lord of the fifth weekday counted from the day itself, so Sunday night opens on Thursday's Shubh. This is the same fifth-weekday rule BPHS Ch. 3 gives for the night portions of the Kaal Velas.

Because the eighth slot repeats the first, a day that opens on an avoid name closes on one too. Sunday, Tuesday and Saturday therefore have four avoid slots in the daylight and the other four weekdays have three. The same holds at night for the three nights that open on an avoid name: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. On those days the usable part of the table is simply smaller, and that is a property of the weekday, not something that varies week to week.

How the engine cuts the day into windows

Naming is the easy half. The harder half is deciding where each slot starts and ends, and that depends on three instants: sunrise, sunset and the next sunrise. The engine calls these the day frame. Everything on the result is cut from them.

1. 1.The date is fixed first. A date you type is read as the calendar date at the place you gave, so a reader asking about the 1st in Auckland gets the 1st there. If you leave the date blank, the engine takes today at that place.
2. 2.The weekday is taken from that local calendar date. It decides the two opening names and the Rahu Kaal slot.
3. 3.Sunrise and sunset are computed for that date at the place's latitude and longitude, and sunrise again for the following date.
4. 4.The stretch from sunrise to sunset is divided into eight equal parts. These are the day slots.
5. 5.The stretch from sunset to the next sunrise is divided into eight equal parts. These are the night slots.
6. 6.Each boundary is converted to the place's own clock, using the zone's offset at that instant, and rounded to the nearest minute for printing.

What counts as sunrise

Sunrise here is the moment the Sun's centre stands fifty arc-minutes below the geometric horizon, the standard altitude used for published rise and set times; it allows for atmospheric refraction and for the Sun's own radius, so it corresponds to the upper edge of the disc appearing. The Sun's position comes from the same astronomy module the rest of the app uses, described on the methodology page, which is also where the app states plainly that it does not use the Swiss Ephemeris. The rise and set times are checked in the test suite against times published by the US Naval Observatory.

Why the slots are not ninety minutes

An eighth of the daylight is ninety minutes only when the daylight is twelve hours. For Mumbai on 1 January 2024 the project's rules document works it through: sunrise 07:11:35, sunset 18:11:54 on the Indian clock, daylight 660.32 minutes, one eighth 82.54 minutes. The night that follows is about thirteen hours, so its eighths run a little over ninety-seven minutes. The same table that prints an 82-minute Amrit in the morning prints a 97-minute Chal after sunset.

Rounding explains a small oddity you will see. The exact slot is 82.54 minutes, and each boundary is rounded to the minute on its own, so consecutive printed slots come out as 82 or 83 minutes: 7:12 to 8:34, then 8:34 to 9:57. No slot is shorter or longer than its neighbours; only the printing differs. A printed boundary can therefore be up to half a minute from the computed one, which is far finer than the method itself deserves.

Clocks, zones and daylight saving

Times are printed on the clock of the place, by its named time zone, and the result states which zone that is. The offset is looked up at each instant rather than once for the day, so a daylight-saving change that falls inside the day is honoured. This follows the BPHS remark quoted earlier that such divisions belong to local time: the slots are cut from the Sun at the place and only afterwards expressed on a civil clock.

When no sunrise is available: the fixed-clock table

The place field is optional, and without a place there is no sunrise to compute. The engine does not guess one. It falls back to a fixed frame and says so in the result. There are three situations in which this happens, and the result names which one applied.

The third case is rare but real. Asked for Tromso on 21 June 2026, when the Sun does not set there, the engine returns the fixed frame on the Oslo clock: Udveg from 6:00 to 7:30 in the morning, and so on in ninety-minute steps. A sunrise-to-sunset division has no meaning on a day with no sunset, and the result says that rather than producing a table that looks precise.

The fixed table is a real approximation, and how far off it is depends on the date. The names in a fixed table are always right, because they depend only on the weekday. The clock times are what shift. Compare the same Thursday, 15 October 2026, with no place and with New Delhi:

A worked choghadiya for one week in Mumbai

The week of 1 to 7 January 2024 in Mumbai is the one this engine is tested against, so it is the natural one to work through. Sunrise moved from 7:12 to 7:13 across the week and sunset from 6:12 to 6:16 in the evening, so the slot length barely changed. The table gives the first two day slots and the first night slot for each date, exactly as the engine returned them.

Read down the first column of names and you have the weekday lords in order: Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Sun. Read across any row and you have the hora order from that starting point. Monday goes Amrit, Kaal, which is Moon, Saturn. The table is generated by one small rule applied seven times, not by seven separate lists.

Monday 1 January, in full

Take the Monday. Its eight day slots are Amrit, Kaal, Shubh, Rog, Udveg, Chal, Labh, Amrit, running from 7:12 in the morning to 6:12 in the evening. Its night slots are Chal, Rog, Kaal, Labh, Udveg, Shubh, Amrit, Chal, running from 6:12 in the evening to 7:12 the next morning. The avoid list the engine returned for that date has seven entries: Kaal (8:34 – 9:57 AM), Rog (11:19 AM – 12:42 PM), Udveg (12:42 – 2:04 PM), Rog (7:49 – 9:27 PM), Kaal (9:27 – 11:04 PM), Udveg (12:42 – 2:19 AM), and Rahu Kaal (8:34 – 9:57 AM).

Notice the first and last entries are the same window. On a Monday, Rahu Kaal is the second eighth of the day, and the second day slot on a Monday is Kaal. The list is not deduplicated: the Kaal slot is there because of its name and Rahu Kaal is appended on its own account. On a Monday that reads as a repeat. On other weekdays the same mechanism produces something more important, covered below.

The same table across the year

To see how much the season changes the windows, here are three dates run through the engine. The slot lengths are worked from the printed sunrise and sunset, so they are accurate to about a minute.

On the June date in Delhi the first slot, Udveg, runs from 5:24 to 7:09 in the morning. A fixed-clock table would have it start at 6:00, thirty-six minutes late, and by the last day slot the two tables are more than an hour apart: the fixed clock ends the day at 6:00 in the evening while the real last slot runs from 5:37 to 7:22. In London on the same date a single day slot lasts over two hours and a night slot under one. The further from the equator and the nearer a solstice, the less a ninety-minute grid resembles the real division.

Reading the result, field by field

The calculator returns four things: the date it settled on, the two lists of slots, the avoid list, and a daylight block that says how the day was framed. Each deserves a careful read.

• The date label is the weekday and date the table belongs to. Check it against what you meant, especially if you left the date blank late at night or are asking about a place in another time zone.
• The day list is eight slots from sunrise to sunset. Each has a name, a grade and a clock range.
• The night list is eight slots from sunset to the next sunrise. It belongs to the same weekday as the day list, even though its last slots fall after midnight.
• The avoid list gathers every slot graded avoid, day slots first and then night slots, each written as the name with its window, and ends with Rahu Kaal and its window.
• The daylight block states the basis (true local sunrise and sunset, or a fixed clock day), the place, the time zone, and the three sunrise and sunset times when they were computed. On a fixed clock those three times are left empty, because 6:00 is not a sunrise and is not printed as one.

The night belongs to the day before it

This is the commonest misreading. The day in this reckoning runs from sunrise to the next sunrise, not from midnight to midnight. So the Monday table above includes Chal from 5:34 to 7:12 in the morning, and that morning is, on a civil calendar, Tuesday. If you want to know about three in the morning on Tuesday the 2nd, you look at the night list for Monday the 1st, not at the table for the 2nd. The table for the 2nd begins at its own sunrise, 7:12.

A good name can sit inside Rahu Kaal

Rahu Kaal and the day choghadiya are cut from the same eight parts, so Rahu Kaal is always exactly one day slot, to the minute. Which slot is set by the weekday, in the table earlier. The grade printed on that slot is not changed by this. The slot keeps the grade of its name, and Rahu Kaal is listed separately at the end of the avoid list. On most weekdays the two agree, because the slot is already an avoid name. On two weekdays they do not. The Rahu Kaal calculator returns the same window with the same daylight block, and the article on Rahu covers the node itself.

Thursday is the case to remember. The only Amrit slot in Thursday's daylight is the sixth, and the sixth is Thursday's Rahu Kaal. The slot list shows it as excellent; the avoid list shows the same window as Rahu Kaal. Both statements are what the two conventions say, and they conflict. Where this app has to choose, it lets Rahu Kaal win: the seven-day plan picks each day's best window from the day slots after removing the one that equals Rahu Kaal, and the Muhurat page states that a window falling inside Rahu Kaal counts as avoid whatever its own name. Read the calculator's table the same way: check the last line of the avoid list before treating a good slot as clear. Thursday night still opens on an Amrit that Rahu Kaal does not touch, since Rahu Kaal is a daylight window only.

What a choghadiya leaves out

The limits follow directly from the inputs. The names depend on the weekday alone. The clock times depend on sunrise and sunset alone. Nothing else enters.

• It knows nothing about you. No birth date, time or place is asked for or used. The table cannot be more or less favourable for one person than another.
• It does not read the Moon. The tithi, the paksha and the Moon's nakshatra are not consulted, so a Shubh slot is graded good on every date that has one.
• It does not know what you intend to do. The same grades apply to signing a lease, starting a journey or sitting an exam. The Muhurat feature is where an activity changes the scoring.
• It repeats exactly. Every Monday opens on Amrit by day and Chal by night. Two Mondays at the same place differ only in clock times, by however much sunrise and sunset have moved.
• It is a convention, not a measurement. The app reports what the published table says for the date; it makes no claim that an event begun in an Amrit slot goes well or that one begun in a Kaal slot goes badly, and it has no evidence either way.
• It is as accurate as the place you give. A table for the wrong town is shifted by the difference in sunrise, which can be many minutes across a large country on a single clock zone.

How it sits beside the other day calculators

Four calculators on this site describe a day rather than a person, and three of them read slices of one and the same computation. Knowing how they overlap saves you from reading the same fact twice as if it were corroboration.

• Rahu Kaal is one of the eight day slots, chosen by weekday. It returns that window together with the same avoid list this page returns, so the two calculators agree by construction, not by independent calculation.
• Hora timings divide the same daylight into twelve parts and the same night into twelve, and give each a planetary lord in the same cycle the day choghadiya follows. An eighth and a twelfth do not line up, so a choghadiya slot usually spans parts of two horas. The first hora and the first day choghadiya always start at the same instant, sunrise, and always belong to the same graha, the weekday's lord.
• The panchang adds what the choghadiya leaves out: the tithi and paksha from the angle between Moon and Sun, and the Moon's phase, alongside this same choghadiya table, the horas and Rahu Kaal for the date. If you want the lunar side on its own, the Moon phase calculator gives it.
• The muhurat calculator is the personal one. It needs birth details, and it scores windows on the Moon's nakshatra, the tithi, the weekday, Rahu Kaal, the house the Moon occupies from your ascendant and your Personal Day number. It does not read choghadiya names at all. A window it rates highly can fall in a Rog slot, and that is not a contradiction; the two methods look at different things.

Where the app itself uses choghadiya

Inside the signed-in app the same function feeds two places, and both use the fixed clock rather than sunrise. The Muhurat page shows a Choghadiya and Hora panel built on a 6:00 start in Indian Standard Time, and the seven-day plan picks one best window per day from the day slots: the first excellent one if there is one, otherwise the first good one, after removing the slot that equals Rahu Kaal. The reason for the fixed clock is stated in the code and on the methodology page: the app knows where you were born, not where you will be on each of those days, and it will not compute a sunrise for a guessed location. This public calculator, where you can name the place, is the more precise of the three. The daily guidance feature and the timing feature describe the personal layers that sit on top.

How the table is held to a published almanac

Since no text in the corpus gives the table, the engine's version is anchored to a published one. The project's rules document records the check: the choghadiya published by Drik Panchang for Mumbai for 1 to 7 January 2024 matches the engine name for name across all seven days and all seven nights, and Sunday night's eight windows match to the minute, from Shubh at 6:16 – 7:53 in the evening through to Shubh at 5:36 – 7:14 the next morning. The Rahu Kaal slot for each weekday is pinned against the same publisher's Rahu Kalam for the same week. These comparisons run in the API test suite, so a change that broke the table would fail a test rather than reach a reader. Agreement with one almanac shows the engine follows the same convention as that almanac; it does not show the convention itself is true of the world.

Questions people ask about choghadiya

Why does this table differ from the one in my calendar or another app?

Usually for one of three reasons. The place is different, so sunrise and sunset are different; even neighbouring cities differ by minutes. The other source may use a fixed 6:00 start, which this calculator also does when you give no place, and says so. Or the sunrise definition differs slightly, for example the Sun's centre on the horizon rather than its upper edge with refraction, which moves every boundary by a few minutes. The names should match for the same weekday; if the night names differ, compare against the weekday table on this page.

Which slots are considered good?

Amrit is graded excellent; Shubh and Labh are graded good; Chal is graded neutral. Udveg, Rog and Kaal are graded avoid. Those grades are fixed per name. One further check applies in daylight: whichever slot coincides with Rahu Kaal is listed in the avoid list as well, even when its own name is Shubh or Amrit.

Why are the slots not exactly ninety minutes long?

Because each is an eighth of the actual daylight or of the actual night at your place. Daylight is twelve hours only near the equinoxes. In Delhi a day slot is about 105 minutes in late June and about 77 minutes in late December, and the night slots do the opposite. Only the fixed-clock table, used when no place is given, has uniform ninety-minute slots.

It is two in the morning. Which table do I read?

The night list of the previous calendar date. The day here runs from sunrise to the next sunrise, so everything before today's sunrise still belongs to yesterday's weekday and yesterday's table.

Does a Rog slot mean something will go wrong with my health?

No. Rog is the name of a slot in a scheduling convention, tied to Mars in the traditional scheme. The engine attaches the grade avoid to the name and nothing more. It is not a prediction about anyone's health and nothing on this page is medical advice.

Is there a classical text behind the table?

Not among the texts this app draws on, and the page does not claim one. BPHS describes the building blocks: an eight-part day opening on the weekday lord and a night opening on the fifth weekday's lord (Ch. 3, notes on the Kaal Velas), the hora order (Ch. 27) and the division of grahas into benefics and malefics (Ch. 3 Sl. 11). The table itself is checked against a published almanac. The sources page lists what each part of the app rests on.