Muhurat - auspicious timing

The panels above say what the Muhurat feature scores. This long read goes underneath them: what the classical texts say about choosing a moment, the exact arithmetic behind every window score, how to read what the page shows, one sample chart run through the real engine, and what a wrong birth time, a missing one or a different city does to the answer. For a quick window without an account, the Muhurat Finder runs the same scorer.

Every number below came from running the code that serves the Muhurat page on a sample birth chosen for this page - 15 June 1990, 10:30 IST, Mumbai - with the 45-day sweep started at noon IST on Monday 5 October 2026. It is not a real person; it is the sample the Timing feature page uses too.

What the classical texts say about choosing a moment

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (Ch. 3, Sl. 33) and Saravali (Ch. 4, Sl. 17) both hand out the units of time to the grahas in order: the half-year to the Sun, the muhurta to the Moon, the day to Mars, the season to Mercury, the month to Jupiter, the fortnight to Venus and the year to Saturn. The muhurta belongs to the Moon. That fits this feature: four of the seven things it scores - nakshatra, tithi, paksha and the Moon's house - are readings of where the Moon is.

The texts this page was checked against are natal works (BPHS, Saravali, Bhrigu Sutras), a horary work (Daivajna Vallabha) and a modern case-study collection, all listed on the sources page. None is a muhurta manual, and none contains a table of nakshatras by activity. What they do contain is the vocabulary and several of the mechanisms, scattered through chapters written for other purposes.

A moment has defects, and they have names

BPHS Ch. 85 (Sl. 1-4) lists conditions under which a birth is held inauspicious even with a well-placed chart: Amavasya, Chaturdashi of the dark half, Bhadra karana, the Sun's entry into a sign, eclipses, Vyatipata and gandanta, among others. The chapter concerns births, but the list is the standard catalogue of panchang defects. Ch. 89 (Sl. 1-7), describing a rite this app does not prescribe, fixes its timing in one clause that reads like a definition of muhurta: a moment when the Moon and the stars are favourable, on a day free of Rikta and Bhadra. Ch. 92 (Sl. 1-4) adds gandanta - the junctions of Revati and Ashwini, Ashlesha and Magha, Jyeshtha and Mula, with matching junctions of tithi and rising sign - and names travel and marriage among the things it warns against there.

Weekdays and hours have lords

Saravali Ch. 7 (Sl. 1-3) gives the weekdays to the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn, counts 24 horas from one sunrise to the next, and gives the first to the weekday's lord and each following one to the lord of the sixth weekday counted on; the notes to BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 13 give the same rule. Daivajna Vallabha Ch. 15 Sl. 33 names the hour lords directly: Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. It is one sequence, and it is the one behind the Hora table on the Muhurat page.

Saravali then states the one openly electional rule in these texts (Ch. 7, Sl. 5-6). An undertaking that belongs to a house does better when started under a rising sign ruled by that house's lord, or on the weekday, hora, year or month that lord rules - at a quarter strength for the year, half for the month, three quarters for the weekday and in full for the hora. The classical choice of moment is personal, running through the lords of your own houses, and the finest unit carries the most weight.

The day is cut into eight parts

BPHS Ch. 3 (Sl. 66-69) divides the daytime of any weekday into eight equal parts. Seven go to the grahas in weekday order from the lord of the day, and the eighth has no lord; the night is divided the same way from the lord of the fifth weekday. Saturn's part is Gulika, the Sun's is Kaal, and the lengths vary with the length of the day. Choghadiya and Rahu Kaal, as this app computes them, stand on the same skeleton - eight parts of the day, eight of the night, keyed to the weekday - with different names and order. Neither name appears in any of the texts above; the engine takes both tables from a published panchang cited in its code.

The Moon waxes and wanes, and the texts differ on what that is worth

BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 11 counts the decreasing Moon among the malefics, and Saravali Ch. 4 (Sl. 9, 36) agrees: benefics gain strength in the bright half, malefics in the dark. That two-way split is what this engine uses. Two graded versions sit beside it. BPHS Ch. 27 (Sl. 10-11) measures Paksha Bala from the Moon's distance from the Sun, so it peaks at the full Moon. Saravali Ch. 5 (Sl. 16-17), reporting the Yavanas, calls the Moon strongest from the bright eleventh to the dark fifth and weakest from the dark sixth to Amavasya. By both measures the days just after the full Moon are among the strongest of the month; the engine's simple split puts them on the unfavourable side.

The moment is read against the person

Daivajna Vallabha is a horary text: it judges the chart of the moment a question is asked, a different discipline from picking a time in advance (this app's version is the Prashna feature). But it shows the habit that matters here. Ch. 7 Sl. 29 says to consider the rising sign of the journey and the natal horoscope together, and Ch. 15 Sl. 24 weighs the moment's rising sign against the person's birth Lagna and birth Moon sign. Its marriage chapter reads the Moon's house (Ch. 12, Sl. 1 and 5), and Ch. 15 Sl. 2 says the Moon is not auspicious in the 8th - all counted from the sign rising at that moment. The Muhurat engine counts the transiting Moon's house from the sign that was rising at your birth.

How one window is scored

A window is scored by one function, scoreMoment() in muhuratEngine.js, at one instant: the minute the window opens. It starts from 34 and adds or subtracts seven terms. The low start is deliberate - a window has to earn a high score from several independent factors agreeing.

The Moon's longitude is computed from a Meeus series and moved to the sidereal zodiac with the Lahiri ayanamsa; the nakshatra is that longitude in 27 arcs of 13°20', as on the Nakshatra calculator. The tithi is the Moon's distance ahead of the Sun in 30 steps of 12°, numbered 1-30, the figure the Moon Phase calculator shows. The Moon's house is counted in whole signs from your Lagna - or, without a birth time, from your natal Moon sign. The Personal Day is the numerology term: birth day plus birth month plus the current year, reduced to one digit; plus the current month, reduced; plus the day of the month, reduced - read on the window's IST calendar date.

What changes with the activity

The nakshatra lists are the engine's own working lists: the code carries them without a chapter reference and none of the texts above gives such a table, so read them as a convention, not a quotation. The house lists do follow the texts. BPHS Ch. 11 puts wealth in the 2nd (Sl. 3), journeys in the 3rd (Sl. 4), lands and buildings in the 4th (Sl. 5), the spouse, travel and trade in the 7th (Sl. 8), livelihood in the 10th (Sl. 11) and income in the 11th (Sl. 12). The engine does not use the 7th for travel or business, although BPHS places both there, and the 5th as the house of speculative returns is the code's own gloss - BPHS gives the 5th learning, children and authority. And a listed house is tested first, so the 6th is not penalised for a new job, nor the 8th for an investment, where the code reads it as other people's money. For every other activity those two houses, and the 12th, cost 20 points.

The weekday lists have a visible logic. Sunday and Saturday are on none of them, and Tuesday only on Travel's: the days of the Sun, Saturn and Mars, the grahas BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 11 names first among the malefics. Daivajna Vallabha Ch. 15 Sl. 34 makes the same cut from the other side, listing the days of malefics among the conditions that suit theft, deceit and war.

The tithi list, exactly

The avoid list is the 4th, 8th, 9th and 14th tithi of each half. The 4th, 9th and 14th are the Rikta tithis in the five-fold classification the app uses for the birth panchang on the Kundali page (BPHS Ch. 92 Sl. 2 names the Nanda and Purna sets, which fixes the cycle). The 8th is the engine's addition; in that same table it is a Jaya tithi, so two parts of the app class it differently. Amavasya itself, tithi 30, is not on the list: it loses 4 points for the dark half like any Krishna tithi and collects the 5 points for a tithi that is not avoided.

Rahu Kaal inside the score

The scorer does not know where you will be on the day, so it has no sunrise to measure from. It uses a fixed civil day of 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM IST in eight 90-minute parts, takes the weekday's part from the table below, and subtracts 25 if the window touches it at all - ten minutes of overlap costs the same as ninety.

Bands, and what one miss costs

A raw score of 78 or more is labelled "Excellent window", 62 to 77 "Good window", and anything below 62 "Usable, with care". From the ceiling of 88, the cost of a single miss is fixed.

Two consequences follow. A window needs either the nakshatra or the Moon's house in its favour to reach Good at all - with both neutral and everything else in favour, the total is 52 plus the tie-break. And the tie-break, which exists only to put equal windows in a stable order, can decide the band of a dark-half window that has everything else.

How personal is the score? Two of the seven terms read your chart: the Moon's house, through the sign of your Lagna or natal Moon, and the Personal Day, through your birth day and month. The other five are the same for everyone who picks the same activity. Two people with the same rising sign whose birth day and month reduce to the same digit get identical windows.

How the sweep works

findMuhurats() looks at three windows a day at fixed IST clock times - 6:40 to 8:10 AM, 9:15 to 10:45 AM and 3:30 to 5:00 PM - on each of the next 45 IST calendar days, starting today. That is 135 candidates. A window that has already closed when you ask is dropped, so the page scores 135 moments early in the morning and 132 by evening. The candidates are sorted by raw score and the top eight come back - the first as the headline, the rest as cards. The list is not filtered by band: it is the eight highest, whatever they are labelled. The side rail counts every Excellent and Good window in the whole sweep and says how many you are shown.

The same function runs at other horizons elsewhere. The public Muhurat Finder scans 30 days and returns the top three. The Timing page scans 30 days for a chosen activity and keeps the best window of each day as a calendar. The what-if panel on the Decision page asks for the single best window in the 30 days after a dasha boundary, and the Career & Money page shows the top three Investment windows across 45 days. A window found on one surface and missing on another is usually outside the shorter horizon, not scored differently.

Each window is scored at its opening minute and the label is applied to the whole 90 minutes. The Moon moves about 0.55° an hour, roughly 0.8° across a window - enough to cross a nakshatra, tithi or sign boundary. In the sample sweep, 16 of 133 windows had at least one of those three change inside the 90 minutes.

The day panel: Choghadiya, Hora and Rahu Kaal

The panel under the answer is about today. It reads neither your chart nor your activity, and it is the same for every reader. It is built on the fixed clock: 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM IST in eight 90-minute Choghadiya slots, eight more through the night, and 24 horas of 60 minutes. The code gives the reason: the profile holds where you were born, not where you are today, and a sunrise for the wrong city would be a guessed time. The public Choghadiya, Rahu Kaal and Hora calculators take a place and cut the same tables from true local sunrise.

By day the names run Udveg, Chal, Labh, Amrit, Kaal, Shubh, Rog - the hora order of their grahas - opening on the weekday's own lord, so Monday opens on Amrit and Saturday on Kaal. By night they run Shubh, Amrit, Chal, Rog, Kaal, Labh, Udveg, opening on the lord of the fifth weekday. Set beside BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 66-69, the openers match exactly; the walk differs. Parashara continues in weekday order and leaves the eighth part without a lord; Choghadiya continues in hora order and repeats the first name. On a Sunday, Parashara gives Saturn the seventh part, Choghadiya's Kaal is the fifth, and Rahu Kaal is the eighth - the one Parashara leaves empty.

Rahu Kaal and the day Choghadiya are cut from the same array, so Rahu Kaal is always exactly one Choghadiya slot. On five weekdays that slot is already graded avoid. On Tuesday it is Shubh and on Thursday it is Amrit, the best name of the day. The strip on the page resolves the clash where it happens: a slot inside Rahu Kaal is drawn as avoid whatever its own grade and carries both names - "Amrit, Rahu Kaal". The strip bands only Amrit, Chal and the avoid stretches; the unbanded gaps are Labh and Shubh.

The Hora table lists 24 planetary hours in the order Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, entered at the weekday's lord; the 25th would be the next weekday's lord, which is why the weekdays come in the order they do. BPHS and Saravali count 24 equal horas from sunrise to sunrise. The app's place-aware calculator gives twelve to the daylight and twelve to the night, so the two halves differ in length. On the Muhurat page's fixed clock the two methods coincide.

The table grades nothing - a hora is a rulership, not a verdict. To use it as Saravali Ch. 7 Sl. 5-6 describes, find the lord of the house your undertaking belongs to in your birth chart and look for that graha's hora. For the sample, with Cancer rising, the 7th house is Capricorn and its lord is Saturn. On Monday 5 October the fixed clock puts Saturn's horas at 7:00-8:00 AM and 2:00-3:00 PM. The engine does not do this step for you - no term in the score reads the hora lord - and the conventions can pull apart: that morning's Saturn hora sits half inside Rahu Kaal.

One sample chart, run through the engine

The sample is 15 June 1990, 10:30 IST, Mumbai. The engine places the Lagna at 29.87° Cancer and the natal Moon at 17.74° Aquarius. With the sweep started at noon on Monday 5 October 2026, two windows had closed and 133 moments were scored.

Take the headline window apart. At 9:15 AM on Wednesday 11 November the engine has the Moon at 225.46° sidereal - in Scorpio, 91% of the way through Anuradha. Start at 34. Anuradha is on the Marriage list: +16. Scorpio is the 5th sign from Cancer, and the 5th is on the list: +14. The Moon is 20.93° ahead of the Sun, which is tithi 2, not avoided: +5. Bright half: +7. Wednesday: +7. The Personal Day is 8 (15 + 6 + 2026 = 2047, reduced to 4; 4 + 11 = 15, reduced to 6; 6 + 11 = 17, reduced to 8): +5. Wednesday's fixed-clock Rahu Kaal is noon to 1:30 PM, so nothing is subtracted. That is 88, plus a tie-break of 1.82, which prints as 90 - the ceiling. It is also two days after the new Moon: the engine gives the full 7 points for the bright half, where BPHS's Paksha Bala for a benefic at that elongation is about 7 virupas out of 60.

Switch to Business launch and the list changes. Its strongest window is Monday 26 October, 9:15 AM, at 80: Ashwini, the Moon in the 10th, tithi 15 of the bright half, a Monday, with only the Personal Day (4) against it. At 9:15 the Moon was 179.74° ahead of the Sun - 0.26° short of full. By the engine's own figures the full Moon passes at about 9:44 AM, half an hour into the window, and the dark half begins; the same day's afternoon window, identical in every other reading, scores 70. And 0.26° is inside the 0.1-0.3° accuracy the project's notes give for this Moon series. The top Business-launch window of the sweep holds its Excellent label by less than the engine's own stated uncertainty.

The next two windows on that list both print 78, with different labels. Monday 5 October at 3:30 PM (Pushya, dark half, Moon in the 1st) has a raw score of 78.33 and reads Excellent; Friday 6 November at 3:30 PM (Hasta, dark half, Moon in the 3rd) has 77.94 and reads Good. Both are 77 before the tie-break. The band is cut on the unrounded score and the number is rounded afterwards.

Wednesday 21 October shows the opening-minute rule and the activity lists at once. By the engine's Moon, the Moon leaves Capricorn - the sample's 7th house - for Aquarius, its 8th, at about 7:05 AM. For Investment the 8th is on the list, so the day improves as it goes: 75 early, 89 at 9:15 AM, 90 in the afternoon. For Marriage the crossing runs the other way. The 6:40 AM window, read with the Moon in the 7th, scores 67, Good; the 9:15 AM window, with the Moon in the 8th, scores 33. The early window keeps its 67 although the Moon is in the 8th for 65 of its 90 minutes.

Most of a sweep is ordinary. For Marriage, 108 of the 133 windows landed in the bottom band, five of them at 0, and the median score was 40. Across the other activities the same chart found 2 Excellent and 18 Good windows for Business launch, 1 and 13 for Travel, 2 and 14 for a new job, 4 and 18 for Investment - and none Excellent, 13 Good, for Property purchase, which has the shortest nakshatra list and only three favoured weekdays.

The scorer can also be pointed at a moment that has already happened, which is how the app checks decisions you log. Had the sample launched a business at 8:00 AM on Monday 5 October, the moment scores 53: the 25-point Rahu Kaal overlap outweighs a listed nakshatra and a supportive house. The three windows the engine would have offered that day score 53, 78 and 78. The app flags a logged act as a missed better window when it fell in the bottom band and the same day offered one at least 12 points higher, and it says nothing about your habits until four acts have been scored.

How to read each kind of result

• The headline names one date and one IST clock range: the highest raw score among up to 135 sampled moments. It is the best of what was sampled, not the best 90 minutes of the next 45 days.
• The number out of 100 is a rating of the window under this engine's rules. It is not a probability or a confidence in a prediction, which is why the page shows no confidence or risk badge beside it.
• "Usable, with care" is the bottom band and covers everything down to 0, whatever its name suggests. Since the list is the top eight regardless of band, such a window can be the strongest on offer.
• The four rows - nakshatra, tithi and paksha, Moon house, Personal Day - are the readings. The sentence under a row is the engine's verdict, and it appears only for a listed nakshatra, a Moon house that helped or hurt, an avoided tithi, the bright half, or a supportive Personal Day. A row with nothing beneath it was neutral or cost points.
• The weekday never gets a sentence, though it is worth 7 points. A Rahu Kaal overlap has no row; it appears under "Why this?" as "Overlaps Rahu Kaal - best avoided".
• The Moon house is counted from your Lagna, or from your natal Moon when the profile has no birth time. The row label is the same in both cases.
• Two cards for the same date with the same score are usually one stretch of time. Between the two morning windows the Moon moves about 1.4°, so they share every reading and differ only in the tie-break.
• In the day strip, the tones mean an Amrit slot, a Chal slot, and an avoid slot or Rahu Kaal. All of it is on the fixed 6:00 AM IST clock, and none of it is personal.

Birth time, place and precision

Only one term reads the birth time: the Moon's house, through the sign of the Lagna. The sample's Lagna sits at 29.87° Cancer. One minute later, at 10:31, it is 0.10° Leo, and every Moon house in the sweep shifts by one. The nakshatras, tithis and dates do not move - what changes is which of them line up with a supportive house. If the Lagna calculator puts your rising sign within a degree or so of a sign edge, read both versions.

Without a birth time the signed-in page still works, counting houses from the natal Moon's sign. That is a defensible anchor - Daivajna Vallabha Ch. 15 Sl. 24 uses the birth Moon sign alongside the birth Lagna - but it answers a different question, as the third column shows. On 161 of the 365 birth dates in 1994, close to half, the Moon also changes sign during the day, and on 349 it changes nakshatra. The public Muhurat Finder is stricter and will not run without a birth time and a resolved place. What a missing birth time costs covers the rest; the app's transit reading from the Moon, with its own rule set, is the Gochar calculator.

Precision is the second limit. The astronomy is not Swiss Ephemeris; the Moon comes from a Meeus series whose accuracy the project's notes give as about 0.1-0.3°, as the methodology page sets out. At the Moon's speed that is roughly 10 to 35 minutes on the clock time of any nakshatra, tithi or sign boundary. In the sample sweep, six of the 133 windows opened within 0.3° of a nakshatra boundary and four within 0.3° of a tithi boundary. Another app may also use a different ayanamsa or ephemeris and place a boundary elsewhere - see why apps disagree on your nakshatra.

Place is the third. On Monday 5 October 2026 the fixed clock puts Rahu Kaal at 7:30-9:00 AM. Cut from true sunrise by the same engine, it is 7:59-9:28 AM in Mumbai, 7:44-9:13 AM in New Delhi and 6:46-8:14 AM in Guwahati, where the Sun rose at 5:17. In Mumbai the sunrise-based Rahu Kaal touches both morning windows; the scorer penalises only the first. For a time you intend to act on, check the Rahu Kaal calculator with your city, and the Daily Panchang for the tithi running at local sunrise. Every window on the Muhurat page is an IST clock time, wherever you read it.

What the Muhurat feature does not do

• It does not cast a chart for the window. BPHS Ch. 88 Sl. 3-5 asks for an auspicious day and an auspicious Lagna, and Daivajna Vallabha Ch. 15 Sl. 26-29 judges a journey by the sign rising at departure. The engine computes no rising sign for the moment, and reads no planet other than the Moon and the Sun.
• It computes no karana and no yoga, so Bhadra, Vyatipata and Vaidhriti - named in BPHS Ch. 85 and Daivajna Vallabha Ch. 15 Sl. 34 - are never tested.
• It does not exclude gandanta. Marriage's list includes Magha, Mula and Revati, and Travel's includes Ashwini and Revati, whose junction edges BPHS Ch. 92 Sl. 3 defines as nakshatra gandanta.
• It checks the Moon's nakshatra against the activity, not against your own birth star. The "Moon and stars favourable" of BPHS Ch. 89 is not computed.
• It does not penalise Amavasya beyond the dark half. In the sample, a Travel window on Saturday 10 October - tithi 30 - scores 71, Good.
• It treats the paksha as two-valued, and it does not score the hora lord, the factor Saravali weights highest.
• It samples three fixed daytime windows. A stronger 90 minutes at 11:30 AM, or any evening hour, is never looked at.
• It scores Marriage for one chart. The other person's chart is not read.
• It has six activities and no general score. Other parts of the app decline to map health or general questions onto the nearest activity, and say so.
• It prescribes no remedies, rituals or gemstones, and a high score is a rating of the moment, not a promise about the undertaking.

Where Muhurat connects to the rest of the app

Muhurat is the fine-timing end of a chain: Timing dates the long periods, Decision weighs the choice - attaching a clock window from this engine for career, money, business and love questions only - and Muhurat picks the hour. The daily dashboard links here for exact times - its own "lucky window" is a fixed rotation keyed to the Moon's house, not this scorer. The button on the headline card opens the AI Life Chat. For a marriage date, the question of two charts together belongs to Compatibility and the Kundli Matching calculator. And when the moment has already arrived and the question is what it says, that is Prashna, which reads the chart of the instant instead of choosing one.

For background, Moon sign and nakshatra explains the two readings most of the score rests on. The five nakshatras that sit on five or six of the activity lists each have a page: Anuradha, Rohini, Uttara Phalguni, Hasta and Uttara Ashadha. When the chart and the numbers point different ways on a date, read when astrology and numerology disagree. Every public tool is on the calculators page.

Questions people ask about Muhurat

Why are my strongest windows weeks away instead of this week?

A high score needs the Moon in a listed nakshatra and a supportive house at the same time, in the bright half, on a tithi that is not avoided. The Moon returns to any one nakshatra about once every 27 days, so each such alignment comes round once or twice in a 45-day sweep. In the sample, the best Marriage window was 37 days out.

Is a "Usable, with care" window a bad time?

It is the bottom band and covers every score below 62, including 0. In the sample, 108 of 133 Marriage windows were in it. The label does not say whether a window narrowly missed Good or lost points on every factor - the score and the rows do. Either way it rates the moment under these rules; it does not forecast the undertaking.

Why is Rahu Kaal here different from my calendar or panchang app?

Most panchangs cut Rahu Kaal from true sunrise and sunset at your city. The Muhurat page uses a fixed 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM IST day because it does not know where you are today. On 5 October 2026 the fixed clock gave 7:30-9:00 AM, while the sunrise-based figure was 7:59-9:28 AM in Mumbai and 6:46-8:14 AM in Guwahati. The Rahu Kaal calculator takes a place.

I do not know my birth time. Can I still use Muhurat?

Yes, on the signed-in page: the Moon's house is counted from your natal Moon sign instead of your Lagna. The dates of the favourable nakshatras and tithis are the same either way; which of them score highest will differ. The public Muhurat Finder needs a birth time and a resolved birth place. This article lists what else a missing time affects.

Does the Marriage score include my partner's chart?

No. The windows are scored against one profile - one Lagna and one birth date. Two people will generally get different lists for the same wedding. Matching the two charts is a separate calculation, on the Kundli Matching calculator linked above.

Why is a new-Moon day sometimes rated Good?

Because Amavasya, tithi 30, is not on the engine's avoid list. It loses 4 points for the dark half and nothing more, so with a listed nakshatra and a supportive house it can reach the Good band. If you follow the tradition that avoids it, check the tithi row and skip any window showing 30.

Why do other muhurat sites give me different dates?

Usually because they apply different rules, not because one of them has the sky wrong. A site may cast the rising sign of the moment, test karana and yoga, compare the day's nakshatra with your birth star, use its own nakshatra lists, or measure Rahu Kaal from sunrise. This engine does none of those and says so above.

Does a score of 90 mean the event will go well?

No. It means every term fell on the favourable side of this engine's lists and the window is clear of the fixed-clock Rahu Kaal. That is a statement about a moment. What you are launching, signing or celebrating, and how well it is prepared, is outside anything the score reads.