Daily Panchang

What a panchang is, and which parts of it this page computes

The word panchang means five limbs. A traditional almanac describes each day by five running quantities: the vara (weekday), the tithi (lunar day), the nakshatra the Moon is passing through, a yoga built from the Sun and Moon together, and the karana, which is half a tithi. The classical texts this app is built on treat these as ordinary working vocabulary. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (BPHS) Ch. 78 lists paksha, tithi and nakshatra among the things an astrologer must recover when a birth record is lost, and Ch. 85 names a tithi, a karana and a yoga in the same breath when it describes the circumstances of a birth.

It is worth being exact about what the Daily Panchang here returns, because the name promises more than two of the five. The engine computes the tithi and its paksha directly, and it carries the weekday in the date label and in everything that depends on it. It does not return the day's nakshatra, yoga or karana. In place of those it returns three timing tables that printed almanacs also carry and that people actually consult through the day: the choghadiya, the twenty-four horas and Rahu Kaal.

• Computed here: tithi (1 to 30), paksha, Moon-Sun elongation, phase name, illumination percentage, the weekday, sunrise and sunset when a place is given, sixteen choghadiya slots, twenty-four horas, Rahu Kaal and an avoid list.
• Not computed here: the day's nakshatra, the Sun-Moon yoga and the karana. For the Moon's nakshatra on a past or present date, the Nakshatra calculator reads it from the same Moon position.
• Not read at all: any birth record. A birth place sent to this calculator changes nothing; the optional place is where the day is observed.

The tithi in the classical texts

A tithi is not a calendar day. It is a slice of the Moon's journey away from the Sun and back again. The texts never define it as a date; they define everything about it through the angle between the two luminaries, and that angle is the single number this calculator is built around.

Paksha: the bright half and the dark half

The thirty tithis fall into two pakshas of fifteen. Shukla Paksha is the bright half, when the Moon is pulling ahead of the Sun and waxing; Krishna Paksha is the dark half, when it is closing the gap again and waning. Saravali Ch. 7 Sl. 4 describes the lunar month as beginning with the first day of the bright half and ending with the 30th tithi, Amavasya, the new Moon.

The paksha matters to the classical authors because it changes how the Moon itself is read. The notes to BPHS Ch. 3 put it plainly: the waning Moon of Krishna Paksh is treated as a malefic and the waxing Moon of Shukla Paksh as a benefic, with the qualification that a waning Moon joined or aspected by a benefic turns benefic again. Saravali Ch. 4 Sl. 36 extends the idea to every graha: malefics gain strength in the dark half and benefics in the bright half.

Paksha Bala: the tithi turned into a number

BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 10-11 gives the arithmetic. Subtract the Sun's longitude from the Moon's. If the result is more than six signs (180 degrees), subtract it from twelve signs (360 degrees). Convert to degrees and divide by three. That is the Paksh Bal, in units called Virupas, of each benefic graha; sixty minus that figure is the Paksh Bal of each malefic. The input to this rule is exactly the elongation this calculator prints, so you can work the rule yourself from the result card. Paksh Bal is one part of Kaal Bal, the temporal strength, which is one of the six strengths the Shad Bala calculator is named for.

Saravali Ch. 5 Sl. 16-17 records a second, coarser reading, attributed to the elders among the Yavanas, which splits the month into three ten-day bands rather than two halves. For the ten days from the first of the bright half the Moon is of medium strength. For the next ten, from the eleventh of the bright half through the fifth of the dark half, she is exceedingly strong. For the last ten, from the sixth of the dark half through the new Moon, she has very little strength. In this engine's numbering those bands are tithis 1 to 10, 11 to 20 and 21 to 30. The two schemes are not the same rule: BPHS grades strength continuously by angle and peaks at the full Moon, while the Yavana bands place the strong period around and after it.

Named tithis the texts single out

BPHS groups tithis by name in a few places. Ch. 92 Sl. 2 calls the 5th, 10th and 15th the Purna tithis and the 1st, 6th and 11th the Nanda tithis, and defines Tithi Gandanta as the last two ghatikas of a Purna tithi and the first two of a Nanda tithi, a junction it asks the reader to treat with care for births, travel and functions. Ch. 89 Sl. 1-7 asks for a muhurta on a day with no Rikta-Bhadra Dosha, without listing which tithis that excludes. Ch. 85 Sl. 1-4 names Amavasya, the 14th tithi (Chaturdasi) of the dark half, Bhadra Karan and Tithikshaya among the circumstances of birth it regards as inauspicious; that passage is about births, and the chapters that follow it are remedial rites, which this app does not prescribe. Saravali Ch. 35 Sl. 87, in the opposite direction, names Vishti (Bhadra) Karana inside a combination it reads as a mark of rulership. The sources do not speak with one voice on these labels, and this calculator reports the tithi number without attaching a verdict to it.

One more classical use is worth knowing. BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 23-26 makes the paksha of birth a condition for choosing a dasha system: Shodshottari is advised for a day birth in Krishna Paksh or a night birth in Shukla Paksh. The paksha is therefore an input to the conditional dashas on the Alternate Dashas calculator.

How the engine turns a moment into a tithi

The whole lunar block of the result comes from one function, lunarDay(), and that function needs only an instant in time. It runs four steps.

1. 1.Convert the instant to a Julian Day.
2. 2.Compute the Sun's apparent ecliptic longitude from the standard polynomial and equation-of-centre series, with a small nutation and aberration correction.
3. 3.Compute the Moon's apparent ecliptic longitude from its mean longitude plus the 35 principal periodic terms of Meeus Table 47.A, with the eccentricity correction on the terms that involve the Sun's anomaly.
4. 4.Take the Moon's longitude minus the Sun's, wrapped into 0 to 360 degrees. That is the elongation. The tithi is the whole number of 12-degree steps completed, plus one.

The code converts both longitudes to sidereal before subtracting, by taking the same Lahiri-style ayanamsa off each. Because the same amount is removed from both, it cancels in the difference. So the tithi does not depend on which ayanamsa an app uses. Two panchangs can disagree about the Moon's nakshatra for the reasons set out in why two apps give you two different nakshatras, and still agree exactly on the tithi, because the tithi only ever asks how far apart the Sun and Moon are. The Ayanamsa calculator shows the value that cancels.

Three consequences follow from that table and are easy to miss. First, tithis 16 to 30 are the dark half counted on: tithi 20 is the fifth of Krishna Paksha, because 20 minus 15 is 5. Second, the full Moon is the end of tithi 15, not its middle. Tithi 15 covers elongations from 168 to 180 degrees, and the instant of exact opposition is the boundary into tithi 16. In the same way tithi 30, Amavasya, covers 348 to 360 degrees and ends at the exact conjunction. Third, the phase name is a looser, eight-part description on its own bands. The Full Moon label covers 157.5 to 202.5 degrees, so it can sit on tithi 14, 15, 16 or 17. When the phase and the tithi seem to disagree, they are not measuring the same thing.

The illumination figure is geometric: the fraction of the Moon's disc that is lit for a given Sun-Moon angle. The Moon Phase calculator uses the same formula, read at a different instant.

Which instant the tithi is read at, and why the result tells you

A tithi lasts roughly a day but does not start at midnight or at sunrise. It starts whenever the elongation crosses a multiple of 12 degrees, which can be any minute of the clock. A calendar date therefore usually contains parts of two tithis, and any calculator that prints one tithi for one date has silently chosen an instant. Printed panchangs choose local sunrise: the tithi running at sunrise names the day. The handler for this calculator follows the same convention when it can, and says so when it cannot.

The result card prints one sentence built from that code, so you always know which you are looking at.

The difference is not theoretical. Take Mumbai on 1 January 2024, the date this engine is pinned against a published almanac in its own test suite. Run with the place, the engine finds sunrise at 7:12 AM, reads the elongation there as 236.70 degrees and returns tithi 20, the fifth of Krishna Paksha, at 77.5 percent illumination. Run for the same date without the place, it reads at 12:00 UTC, finds 241.34 degrees and returns tithi 21 at 74 percent. A minute-by-minute scan of the engine puts the change from 20 to 21 at 2:31 PM IST that afternoon; the project's rules document records Drik Panchang publishing 2:28 PM for the same boundary. Both readings are correct for their instant. Only the sunrise one matches what a printed panchang calls that day.

Sunrise, sunset and the frame of the day

Everything below the lunar block is cut from three instants: sunrise, sunset and the next sunrise. With a place, those come from the method in Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, chapter 15. The engine takes the Sun's right ascension and declination at local noon, solves for the hour angle at which the Sun stands at the standard altitude of minus 0 degrees 50 minutes, and refines each event by recomputing the Sun's position until the correction is under a tenth of a second. That altitude is 34 arc-minutes of refraction at the horizon less the Sun's 16 arc-minute semidiameter, so sunrise means the moment the upper limb appears, which is the convention almanacs publish against.

The project's rules document pins four of these against the US Naval Observatory's published times to the minute, including New Delhi on 15 January 2026 (computed 07:14:59 and 17:46:13, published 07:15 and 17:46). Elevation and terrain are not modelled. The local day itself is built from the place's IANA timezone, so a daylight-saving change is honoured, and a place with coordinates but no timezone is refused rather than given a zone guessed from its longitude.

Three fallbacks exist, and each has its own code in the result's daylight block.

• noPlace: the place field was empty. The day is a fixed 06:00 to 18:00 IST clock. Every choghadiya is exactly ninety minutes and every hora exactly sixty.
• placeUnresolved: you typed a place and neither the bundled list nor the geocoder found it. The same fixed IST clock is used and the note says the place was not found. No coordinates are invented.
• noSunrise: the place is known but the Sun does not rise and set there that day. Tromso on 21 June 2026 returns this. The grid is a fixed 06:00 to 18:00 on the local clock, and the tithi falls back to the 12:00 UTC reading.

The weekday and its twenty-four horas

The vara is the one limb of the panchang that needs no astronomy, and it drives every table on this page. Saravali Ch. 7 Sl. 1 gives the rulers: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn rule the weekdays in that order, Sunday to Saturday. BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 13 gives the weekday lord a share of temporal strength called Dina Bal, and the lord of the hour a larger share called Hora Bal: 45 and 60 Virupas respectively.

The hora is the planetary hour. Both texts describe it the same way. Saravali Ch. 7 Sl. 2-3: there are 24 horas in each day, from one sunrise to the next; the first is ruled by the lord of the weekday and each one after by the lord of the sixth weekday counted from the one before. The notes to BPHS Ch. 27 repeat the rule and add that the sequence continues until the first hora of the next day is taken over by that day's own lord.

Counting six weekdays on from Sunday, inclusively, lands on Friday; six on from Friday lands on Wednesday; and so on. The order that results is Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, which is the seven grahas arranged from slowest to fastest and read as a loop. That is the list the engine holds as its hora order, entered at the weekday's own lord. On a Thursday the first hora is Jupiter's; twenty-four steps later is three steps round a seven-part loop, which lands on Venus, the lord of Friday. The weekday order falls out of the hora order.

Saravali Ch. 7 Sl. 5-6 is the classical reason anyone looks at a hora table. It says the results of a house are better reaped when an undertaking belonging to that house is begun on the weekday, in the hora, or in the year or month ruled by that house's lord, and it weights them: a quarter for the year lord, half for the month lord, three quarters for the weekday lord and the whole for the hora lord. To use that you need to know which graha rules which house in your own chart, which is what the birth chart tool gives you. The Hora calculator returns the same twenty-four windows on their own.

Choghadiya and Rahu Kaal inside the panchang result

The daylight is divided into eight equal parts and the night into eight more. Each part carries one of seven names, and the eighth slot repeats the first. The engine holds one cycle for the day (Udveg, Chal, Labh, Amrit, Kaal, Shubh, Rog) and a different cycle for the night (Shubh, Amrit, Chal, Rog, Kaal, Labh, Udveg), and a weekday table says which name opens each. The grades are fixed: Amrit is excellent, Shubh and Labh are good, Chal is neutral, and Udveg, Rog and Kaal are avoid.

The day cycle is the hora order under other names. The engine's own notes pair each name with a graha (Udveg with the Sun, Chal with Venus, Labh with Mercury, Amrit with the Moon, Kaal with Saturn, Shubh with Jupiter, Rog with Mars), and the day begins on the name belonging to the weekday's lord. That is why Thursday opens on Shubh and Monday on Amrit. The night takes the same seven names five places at a time and opens on the lord of the fifth weekday counted from the current one.

No text in this app's library gives the choghadiya table or the Rahu Kaal table, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What the library does contain is the same skeleton. The notes to BPHS Ch. 3, explaining the five Kaal Velas that include Gulik, describe the day's duration divided into eight equal parts, the first allotted to the weekday lord, the eighth left without a lord, and for the night the first part going to the lord of the fifth weekday counted from the day in question. The eightfold day and the fifth-weekday night opener are both there. The names, grades and the order used inside the day are not; BPHS runs its portions in weekday order, and the choghadiya runs them in hora order. The engine's two weekday tables were instead pinned, name for name, against Drik Panchang's published choghadiya for Mumbai for all seven days and nights of 1 to 7 January 2024.

Rahu Kaal is simpler: one of the eight daylight parts, chosen by weekday alone. The table is the second part on Monday, the third on Saturday, the fourth on Friday, the fifth on Wednesday, the sixth on Thursday, the seventh on Tuesday and the eighth on Sunday. Because Rahu Kaal and the day choghadiya are read from the same eight divisions, the Rahu Kaal window is always exactly one choghadiya slot, to the minute. The Choghadiya calculator and the Rahu Kaal calculator return these slices separately, with the same disclosure about which clock they were cut from.

A worked panchang: New Delhi, Thursday 15 October 2026

Here is 15 October 2026 run through the engine twice: once with no place, and once with New Delhi (28.6139 N, 77.2090 E, Asia/Kolkata).

Start with the tithi. The two elongations differ by 5.10 degrees because the two readings are eleven hours and eight minutes apart, which is a rate of about 0.46 degrees an hour. At that rate a 12-degree tithi takes about 26 hours, and a scan of the engine confirms it: tithi 5 runs from 1:15 AM IST on the 15th to 3:27 AM IST on the 16th, 26 hours 12 minutes. Sunrise in Delhi falls comfortably inside that span, so both readings agree on Panchami. They disagree only when a tithi boundary falls between the two instants, which is the Mumbai case described earlier.

Now apply BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 10-11 to the sunrise figure. The elongation of 50.36 degrees is under six signs, so it is used as it stands; divided by three it gives 16.79 Virupas of Paksh Bal for each benefic, and 60 minus 16.79 is 43.21 for each malefic. This is a waxing Moon, in Shukla Paksh, but an early one, and the arithmetic says so: the bright-half advantage BPHS describes is real on tithi 5 but small, and it reaches its full 60 only at the full Moon.

The day frame shows what a place changes. Delhi's daylight on this date is 11 hours 30 minutes, so each day choghadiya is about 86 minutes rather than 90, and the night, at 12 hours 30 minutes, gives slots of about 94. The day horas come to about 57.5 minutes and the night horas 62.5. On 21 June 2026 in London the same engine returns daylight from 4:43 AM to 9:22 PM, day choghadiya of about two hours five minutes, night choghadiya of about 55 minutes, and a Rahu Kaal from 7:17 PM to 9:22 PM. On a fixed clock that Sunday's Rahu Kaal would be printed as 4:30 to 6:00 PM. Away from the tropics and away from the equinoxes, the fixed grid is not a small approximation.

Reading each block of the result

• Date label: the weekday and calendar date the tables belong to. With a place it is the date you typed, at that place. With no place and no date it is today on the IST calendar, including between midnight and 5:30 AM IST, when the UTC date is still yesterday.
• Lunar block: one tithi, at one instant. The sentence beneath it says whether that instant was sunrise, 12:00 UTC or the moment you asked. A tithi from the last two bases can differ from a printed panchang's.
• Daylight note: names the clock every window is on (the place's own zone, or IST) and, with a place, prints sunrise, sunset and the next sunrise. If it says the day was taken as a fixed 06:00 to 18:00, nothing below it was measured from the Sun.
• Avoid list: every slot graded avoid, day then night, followed by Rahu Kaal. It is a summary of the tables above it, not a separate calculation.

Limits of this panchang, stated plainly

• It gives two of the five limbs. Nakshatra, yoga and karana for the day are not returned, so this cannot replace a full almanac for a ceremony whose rules depend on them.
• It gives the tithi at one instant and does not print when that tithi began or will end. It does not flag a tithi that begins and ends between two sunrises and so names no day, the situation BPHS Ch. 85 calls Tithikshaya, nor one that spans two sunrises.
• The Sun and Moon positions come from published series, not from the Swiss Ephemeris, and the methodology page says so. Tithi boundaries are good to a few minutes, not to the second.
• The choghadiya and Rahu Kaal tables come from a published modern almanac, not from any classical text in this app's library. They are reported as a convention, with no claim about what happens if you ignore them.
• It names no festival, fast or observance. Those depend on regional rules about which tithi must touch which part of the day, and none of that is coded here.
• It is not personal. Nothing in it reads your chart, so it cannot say whether a window suits you or your purpose.

Birth-time sensitivity, which most calculator pages have to discuss, does not arise: there is no birth time in the input. The sensitivity here is to place. A different city moves sunrise, and with it every window and occasionally the tithi itself.

Where the panchang connects to the rest of the app

The Daily Panchang describes the day for everyone. The step from there to a day for one person is taken by the Muhurat feature and the Muhurat calculator, which score candidate windows against your own chart. Their scoring reads the same lunarDay() function: a window in Shukla Paksha earns points, a window overlapping Rahu Kaal loses them, and eight tithis (4, 8, 9, 14 and their dark-half counterparts 19, 23, 24 and 29) are marked as traditionally avoided. The code is candid that this list cites no text; BPHS Ch. 89 asks for a day without Rikta-Bhadra Dosha but names no tithi. Because a muhurat is scored without knowing where the activity will take place, its Rahu Kaal uses the fixed IST grid, so it can differ by a few minutes from the sunrise-based window this page prints for your city.

The tithi at your own birth is a different reading of the same quantity, taken at the birth instant, and it travels with the Moon's sign and star covered in the Moon, the nakshatra and the rashi and in the planned guide to the Moon in Vedic astrology. If your birth time is uncertain, what an unknown birth time costs applies to the birth tithi too, since the Moon covers a whole tithi in about a day.

Where today's Moon falls relative to your natal Moon is a transit question, answered by the Gochar calculator. A question asked of the moment rather than of a birth belongs to Prashna; BPHS Ch. 78 is the classical example, recovering a lost paksha and tithi from a query chart. The texts quoted on this page are listed with their editions on the sources page.

Questions people ask about the Daily Panchang

Why does my printed panchang show a different tithi for the same date?

Almost always because of the instant. A printed panchang names the tithi running at sunrise in the city it was computed for. If you left the place blank, this calculator read the tithi at 12:00 UTC, or at the moment you asked, and the result says so. Enter your city and compare again. If the two still differ, check whether sunrise falls within a few minutes of a tithi change, where a truncated lunar series and a full ephemeris can land on opposite sides.

Why is the phase called Full Moon when the tithi is 14 or 16?

The phase name and the tithi use different bands. The tithi cuts the circle into thirty 12-degree steps. The phase name cuts it into eight 45-degree bands centred on the new Moon, the quarters and the full Moon, so Full Moon covers elongations from 157.5 to 202.5 degrees. That band includes the end of tithi 14, all of 15 and 16, and the start of 17.

Do I need to give a place?

No, but the result is a different thing without one. With no place the day is a fixed 06:00 to 18:00 IST, every window is an even ninety or sixty minutes, and the tithi is not read at sunrise. That is a reasonable approximation for much of India near the equinoxes and a poor one in a northern summer or winter. With a place, the windows are cut from that place's own sunrise and sunset and the tithi is the one a printed panchang would name.

Rahu Kaal falls on an Amrit slot in my result. Which one is right?

Both are what their tables say. Rahu Kaal is assigned by weekday to one of the eight daylight parts, and the choghadiya names are assigned by weekday to the same eight parts by a separate table. On Thursdays the sixth part is both. The calculator lists the window under both headings and does not choose between them. No classical text in this app's library addresses either table, so there is no source here to settle it.

Can I use this to fix a wedding or ceremony date?

Not on its own. A ceremony muhurta in the tradition weighs the nakshatra, the yoga and the karana, and this calculator does not return those. It also reads nothing from the charts of the people involved. It can tell you the tithi at sunrise and lay out the day's windows for a place; the Muhurat feature adds a score against one person's chart. Neither is a guarantee about how the day will go.

Does the panchang day start at midnight?

Not in this result when a place is given. The day runs from sunrise to the next sunrise, so the last night choghadiya and the last few horas fall after midnight on the following civil date while still belonging to the weekday in the label. In the Delhi example the Sun's hora from 5:20 to 6:22 AM on Friday morning is the twenty-fourth hora of Thursday.