Pick a city and a date to see when each of the twelve signs is rising: the clock time it takes the eastern horizon, the clock time it leaves, and how long it holds. The sign rising right now is marked. Each row also carries that sign's Panchaka-Rahita grade for the day, which the daily panchang gives for all twelve signs without ever saying when any of them is up.
The lagna, or ascendant, is the point of the zodiac that is crossing the eastern horizon at a given moment. It is not a property of the day, like the tithi or the nakshatra: it is a property of the instant and the place, and it moves faster than anything else in a chart. The whole zodiac passes the horizon once every sidereal day, so a new sign takes over roughly every two hours and the same table repeats about four minutes earlier tomorrow.
That speed is why the lagna is the part of a chart most sensitive to the recorded birth minute, and why an electional window that straddles a boundary is two elections rather than one. It is also why this table is worth printing at all: the sign is stated on every chart the engine casts, but the times at which it changes are not stated anywhere else on the site.
If the signs each took exactly one twelfth of the day the table would be dull. They do not, because the zodiac is tilted about 23.44 degrees against the celestial equator, so from anywhere off the equator some signs climb the horizon steeply and go by quickly while others lie along it and take much longer. The effect grows with latitude and reverses between the hemispheres.
Measured at New Delhi on 29 August 2026, the shortest was Pisces at 1 hour 25 minutes and the longest was Cancer at 2 hours 20 minutes - a difference of nearly an hour between the fastest and slowest sign of the same day. On that day every sign from Gemini to Sagittarius took more than two hours and every sign from Capricorn to Aries under an hour and three quarters, with Taurus falling between the two runs at almost exactly two hours. The change is gradual rather than a two-way split, which is why the signs near the crossover sit close to the two-hour average.
Further north the spread widens sharply. It is not a defect in the calculation and it is not a rounding error: it is what the sky does, and it is the reason a lagna table printed for one city cannot be reused in another.
Two inputs move every row. Longitude moves the whole table more or less bodily: the horizon reaches a given zodiac point four minutes earlier for each degree you go east, and India keeps one clock across roughly 29 degrees of longitude, so a table computed for Mumbai runs about an hour out of step with one computed for Kolkata while both read the same hour on the wall, and the country's full east-west spread is closer to two.
Latitude does something different. It does not shift the table so much as stretch and squeeze the individual rows, because it is latitude that decides how steeply each sign meets the horizon. So a table borrowed from a city at the same longitude but a different latitude will have the right general shape and the wrong durations.
The daily panchang grades all twelve rising signs for Panchaka-Rahita and prints no times beside them; this page prints the times. Each row therefore carries the grade the panchang gives, passed through unchanged rather than recomputed, so the two pages cannot end up saying different things about the same rule.
The rule is Muhurta Chintamani's, and it is a sum: the tithi counted 1 to 15 within its paksha, plus the weekday counted Sunday as 1, plus the nakshatra counted 1 to 27, plus the rising sign counted 1 to 12. The remainder on division by nine decides. Five of the nine remainders name a panchaka and bar that rising sign; the other four leave it Panchaka-Rahita. It is a different rule from the Panchak the north-Indian panchang prints for the Moon in Aquarius or Pisces; the two share five names and are assigned by unrelated criteria, so a reading from one does not carry to the other.
One thing to watch when reading a graded row against a clock time. The grade shown is the day's sunrise-reckoned one, which is what an almanac prints, and on most days the tithi or the nakshatra changes partway through - so for rows past that change the day-level grade is no longer the grade of that moment. The page prints both change times for exactly this reason, and the muhurta finder is where a specific window is graded on its own values.
Two choices, and both are stated rather than hidden. The first is the house system, which does not arise here: the ascendant is a single point on the ecliptic, so no house division is involved in producing this table at all.
The second does arise, and practitioners genuinely disagree about it. Sidereal longitudes are tropical longitudes minus an ayanamsha, and there is no single agreed ayanamsha. This table uses Lahiri (Chitrapaksha), the value adopted for the Indian national calendar and printed by most panchangs. B. V. Raman's value differs from it by about 1.446 degrees, which at Delhi's latitude moves each boundary by roughly four to seven minutes depending on how fast the sign in question is rising; the Krishnamurti (KP) value differs from Lahiri by its own smaller amount. No ayanamsha is offered as a switch here, so a reader who works in Raman or KP should expect this table to sit a few minutes away from theirs and should not treat the difference as an error in either.
What does not move the times is anything about the person. A lagna table is a property of a place and a date, so it is the same table for everyone standing in that city on that day.
Beyond the polar circle - latitude above about 66.56 degrees north or south - the tilted zodiac can come to lie flat along the horizon. At that instant the rising sign does not advance to the next one; it jumps by half the zodiac. There is then no continuous sequence of rising signs for the day and no honest set of start and end times to print.
This page refuses those places outright and says why, rather than returning twelve plausible rows. The refusal is not a latitude cutoff applied in advance: the day is scanned first and the answer is checked for the three things that must be true of a real lagna table - that the ascendant never jumps, that each change hands off to the very next sign in order, and that all twelve signs actually appear. A place just inside the polar circle where all three hold is served normally.
The ascendant is computed directly for the moment rather than interpolated from a printed table, and the boundary between two signs is then found by search: the day is scanned on a coarse grid until an interval is found that contains a crossing, and that interval alone is narrowed until the crossing is pinned to a fraction of a second. Displayed times are rounded to the minute; the durations beside them are measured from the underlying instants and not by subtracting the two rounded clock times.
On the two days a year a clock changes, the civil day is 23 or 25 hours rather than 24 and the page says so, because on those days one sign may rise once where it usually rises twice, or twice where it usually rises once.
The table marks it. Open the page with your city selected and today's date, and the sign currently on the eastern horizon is highlighted with its start and end time, so you can also see how long is left of it.
Because the zodiac is tilted about 23.44 degrees to the celestial equator, so from any latitude off the equator some signs meet the horizon steeply and rise fast while others lie along it and take longer. Measured at Delhi on 29 August 2026 the shortest was Pisces at 1 hour 25 minutes and the longest Cancer at 2 hours 20 minutes. The spread widens the further you go from the equator and reverses in the southern hemisphere.
The zodiac completes one pass of the horizon in a sidereal day, which is about four minutes short of a civil day. So the sign that is rising at midnight usually comes back round before the next midnight and holds the horizon twice within the same calendar day. Both windows are shown on that sign's row, along with how much of the day it covered in total.
No. A lagna table belongs to a place and a date, not to a person, so it is the same for everyone in that city on that day. If you want the ascendant of your own birth moment instead, the ascendant calculator takes your birth date, time and place.
Almost always the ayanamsha. This table uses Lahiri (Chitrapaksha); Raman's value differs by about 1.446 degrees, which moves each boundary by roughly four to seven minutes at Delhi's latitude, and KP uses another value again. A difference of that size between two tables is a difference of convention, not an error in either. Larger gaps usually mean the other table was computed for a different city.
Beyond the polar circle, above about 66.56 degrees of latitude, the tilted zodiac can lie flat along the horizon, and at that instant the rising sign jumps by half the zodiac instead of moving on to the next sign. There is then no continuous run of rising signs to tabulate. Rather than print twelve rows that would look ordinary and be wrong, the page says so and stops.
It is the Muhurta Chintamani rule the daily panchang already applies to all twelve rising signs: add the tithi within its paksha, the weekday, the nakshatra and the rising sign, and take the remainder on division by nine. Five remainders name a panchaka and bar that rising sign, four leave it Panchaka-Rahita. The grade shown is the day's sunrise-reckoned one, so once the tithi or nakshatra changes it stops describing the moment; both change times are printed on the page for that reason.
For educational purposes. Astrological interpretations are traditional and not a substitute for professional advice.