Hindu calendar elements for any date
A panchang is the five limbs of a Hindu day, and this page computes all five for one date at one place: the tithi, the vara or weekday, the nakshatra the Moon occupies, the yoga and the karana, each with the local clock time at which it ends and the name of the one that follows it.
Around them it prints sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, the Moon's sign and the Sun's sign, so a single calculation describes the whole day rather than a table being looked up.
The five limbs are moving quantities, not calendar labels, which is why end times are given instead of one word for the day. A tithi is 12 degrees of separation between the Moon and the Sun, so a lunar month holds 30 of them and a single one runs anywhere from about 19.4 to 26.2 hours.
A nakshatra is a segment of 13 degrees 20 minutes of the Moon's path, 27 to the circle. A yoga applies that same division to the sum of the Sun's and the Moon's longitudes. A karana is half a tithi, 60 to the month. Only the vara, counted from sunrise, keeps step with the clock.
Every window on this page hangs off the local sunrise and sunset, so the city selector changes the numbers and not just the label above them.
Sunrise moves with latitude and longitude, the length of the daylight arc moves with the season, and the moment a tithi or a nakshatra ends is an instant in universal time that falls at a different local clock reading in each place. A panchang computed for Delhi is not the panchang for Chennai on the same date.
The day-part windows show this most plainly. The daylight arc from sunrise to sunset is cut into eight equal parts, and three of them carry names: Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika, each taking a part fixed by the weekday.
Rahu Kaal is the eighth part on Sunday, the second on Monday, the seventh on Tuesday, the fifth on Wednesday, the sixth on Thursday, the fourth on Friday and the third on Saturday. Because it is a proportional eighth and not a fixed 90 minutes, its width changes through the year.
The same calculation feeds a second layer. Dur-Muhurtam gives the one or two inauspicious muhurtas that each weekday carries among the fifteen diurnal muhurtas, named after their presiding deities in the Muhurta Chintamani and the Uttara Kalamrita.
Bhadra lists every Vishti karana overlapping the day with its mukha and puccha in real time order; a lunar month holds exactly eight Vishti karanas, so on more days than not the block is empty. Panchak, Ganda-moola, Tithi-Shunya, Disha-Shool, Tara Bala and Chandra Bala each get their own block, and the other era reckonings sit in a collapsible drawer under the day's heading.
Varjyam, also called Thyajyam, is worked out by treating each nakshatra's own span as sixty ghatis, marking a four-ghati range inside it, and mapping that range proportionally onto the nakshatra's real start and end times for the day.
Ashwini's published range is the 51st to the 54th ghati, which is 50 to 54 ghatis elapsed. Amrita Kaala is read the same way from a separate published table whose range is four ghatis wide on every nakshatra. Because a nakshatra's real duration varies, neither window is a constant number of minutes.
A muhurta in this engine is proportional: one fifteenth of the actual daylight arc, or of the actual night arc, because the day is always fifteen muhurtas however long it happens to be (Mahabharata 13.126.36). So a diurnal muhurta at a north Indian latitude is longer in June than in December, and Abhijit, which is the eighth of the fifteen and has apparent noon at its midpoint, stretches and shrinks with it.
Other windows use a fixed ghati of exactly 24 minutes. Tithi-Gandanta is one: it is the last two ghatis of the 5th, 10th and Purnima and the first two of the 6th, 11th and the dark-half first, so each band is exactly 48 minutes wide on every date.
The arunodaya that separates the two Ekadashi reckonings is likewise a fixed four ghatikas, 96 clock minutes, before sunrise. Varjyam's ghati, by contrast, is a sixtieth of the nakshatra's own length. The two units are never mixed, because proportionalising a fixed rule would let the window drift with the season and the almanacs do not count it that way.
A collapsible drawer under the day's heading carries eleven further era rows for the same date: the Chaitradi Shaka year expired and current, the Meshadi solar Shaka, the Kali year expired and current, three Vikrama reckonings, the Bengali San, both Kollam andus, the Vilayati year and the Amli year. Each is derived from the date rather than looked up, and each carries the article number of the rule it follows in Sewell and Dikshit's Indian Calendar.
The three Vikrama rows disagree with each other on most days of the year, and that disagreement is the information. The northern reckoning begins its year at Chaitra, the southern or Gujarat reckoning at Karttika, and a third regional variant at Ashadha, so between those months the same date sits in different Vikrama years depending on which region is asking. Printing one of them and calling it the Vikrama year would be this page choosing a region on the reader's behalf.