Pick a city and a date to get that day's sunrise and sunset, solar noon, how long the day and the night actually run, and the three twilight boundaries either side of them. Sunrise is the anchor the whole Hindu almanac hangs from, so the same page also shows the two windows it defines directly - Brahma Muhurta and Abhijit.
Sunrise is the moment the Sun's upper edge first appears on the horizon, and sunset the moment that same edge disappears - not the moment the Sun's centre crosses. The atmosphere also bends light, lifting the Sun's apparent position by roughly half a degree near the horizon, so you see it rise a few minutes before it geometrically does and set a few minutes after. Both effects are included here.
That is why two almanacs can print sunrise a minute or two apart for the same city on the same day: they are answering slightly different questions - upper edge or centre, with refraction or without. Nothing is wrong with either; the convention simply has to be stated. This page uses the upper edge with standard refraction, which is the convention Indian panchangs follow.
India keeps one time zone across nearly 3,000 kilometres of longitude - 68.1°E to 97.4°E - and the Sun does not. Every degree of longitude east brings sunrise four minutes earlier, so Kolkata sees the Sun well before Mumbai while both read the same hour on the clock. Latitude then decides how much the day stretches and shrinks across the year: near the equator day length barely moves, and the further north you go the wider it swings.
This is exactly why a printed sunrise table for 'India' is of no use for a muhurta. Rahu Kaal, Choghadiya, the Hora and Abhijit are all fractions of your local sunrise-to-sunset span, so they inherit every one of those minutes.
Day length is measured from sunrise to sunset, night length from sunset to the next sunrise. This page measures both as real elapsed time rather than subtracting the printed clock times - which matters wherever daylight saving is observed, because the night that contains the changeover is genuinely an hour shorter or longer than the clock suggests.
Solar noon is the instant the Sun crosses your meridian - its highest point of the day - and it is almost never twelve o'clock. Your longitude within the time zone shifts it, and the Earth's tilted, slightly elliptical orbit shifts it again by up to about a quarter of an hour either way over the year. The day-length figure also carries how much the day has gained or lost since yesterday, which peaks near the equinoxes and falls to nothing at the solstices.
Twilight is measured by how far the Sun's centre has dropped below the horizon, and there are three standard depths:
The Hindu civil day runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight. A tithi, nakshatra or yoga is reported for the day whose sunrise it covers, and every weekday-keyed window is a division of the same span: the daytime is cut into eight equal parts for Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika, into fifteen for the muhurtas, and into eight again for the day Choghadiya.
Two of those windows are shown here because they follow from sunrise alone. Brahma Muhurta is the stretch from 96 to 48 minutes before sunrise. Abhijit is the eighth of the fifteen equal daytime muhurtas, so it straddles solar noon and is about as long as one-fifteenth of your daylight - which means it is noticeably longer in June than in December.
Because the clock is shared and the sky is not. Sunrise moves about four minutes earlier for every degree of longitude you go east, so cities hours apart in real solar time still read the same hour on the clock. Latitude then changes how long the day runs. Choose your own city rather than a regional table.
Almost never. Solar noon is when the Sun actually crosses your meridian. Your position within the time zone shifts it: Delhi sits 5.3° west of the 82.5°E clock meridian, which puts its average solar noon at about 12:21 IST. The equation of time, caused by the Earth's tilt and its elliptical orbit, then moves it up to about a quarter of an hour either side - measured across 2026 it swings from 12:05 in early November to 12:35 in mid-February.
Dawn is when twilight begins - the Sun is still below the horizon but the sky is already lightening. Sunrise is when the Sun's upper edge actually appears. The gap depends on the twilight band you mean. Across Indian latitudes and seasons, civil dawn runs about 21 to 29 minutes before sunrise and astronomical dawn about 70 to 105 minutes - shortest near Kanyakumari at an equinox, longest at Srinagar in midsummer.
It is a fixed offset: the window running from 96 minutes before sunrise to 48 minutes before it. Because it is pegged to sunrise, it shifts with your city and the date exactly as sunrise does. The dedicated Brahma Muhurta page covers the practice around it.
Different conventions. Some tables use the Sun's centre rather than its upper edge, some assume a different refraction value, and some are computed for a state capital rather than your town. The times here use the upper edge with standard refraction at the exact coordinates of the city you pick.
Above the Arctic and Antarctic circles there are dates with no sunrise or no sunset at all. On those days day length, night length and the sunrise-derived windows are genuinely undefined, and the page says so instead of printing a time borrowed from another day. Any twilight boundary the Sun does cross is still shown.
For educational purposes. Astrological interpretations are traditional and not a substitute for professional advice.