Aaj Ka Panchang — Today's Panchang

The word panchanga is literally "five limbs" — pancha (five) and anga (limb). A day's panchang is not a forecast. It is a measurement: five independent quantities derived from where the Sun and Moon actually are, each of which classical Jyotish reads for a different purpose. Understanding what the five are is what turns aaj ka panchang from a table of unfamiliar words into something you can act on.

Tithi — the lunar day. A tithi is the time the Moon takes to gain 12° of longitude on the Sun. Thirty of them make one lunar month: fifteen in Shukla Paksha, while the Moon waxes toward Purnima, and fifteen in Krishna Paksha, while it wanes toward Amavasya. Because the Moon's orbital speed is not constant, a tithi is not a fixed 24 hours — it can run roughly 19 to 26 hours. That is why aaj ki tithi usually ends partway through the civil day rather than at midnight, and why the panchang lists an ending time rather than a date. Almost every Hindu festival, fast and shraddha date is fixed by tithi, not by the Gregorian calendar, which is why they appear to move each year. Each tithi also carries a presiding lord, shown alongside it here.

Nakshatra — the lunar mansion. The zodiac is divided into 27 nakshatras of exactly 13°20′ each, and each nakshatra into four padas of 3°20′. The nakshatra of the day is simply the one the Moon is currently passing through; it changes roughly once every 24 hours. Nakshatra is the oldest layer of Indian astronomy — older than the twelve-sign zodiac in Indian use — and it carries most of the practical weight in Vedic astrology. It drives Vimshottari Dasha, it decides muhurta selection, and it is the basis of the Ashtakoot gun-milan used in marriage matching. Your own janma nakshatra comes from the Moon's position at birth, not from today's.

Yoga — the Sun-Moon sum. This is the limb most people misread, so it is worth being blunt: panchanga yoga is not the same thing as a chart yoga. Raj Yoga, Gaja Kesari Yoga and Kemadruma Yoga are planetary combinations in a birth chart and have nothing to do with this. Panchanga yoga is a single arithmetic quantity — the sidereal longitudes of the Sun and Moon added together, then divided into 27 segments of 13°20′. Each segment has a name, from Vishkambha through Vaidhriti. Several are traditionally treated as unfavourable for beginning new work, with Vyatipata and Vaidhriti flagged most consistently across texts. The two systems share only a Sanskrit word.

Karana — the half-tithi. A karana is half a tithi: 6° of Moon-Sun separation, so sixty karanas per lunar month. There are eleven named types. Seven are chara (movable) — Bava, Balava, Kaulava, Taitila, Gara, Vanija and Vishti — and they cycle eight times through the month to fill fifty-six slots. The remaining four are sthira (fixed) and occur once each: Kimstughna opens the month at the first half of Shukla Pratipada, and Shakuni, Chatushpada and Naga close it across Krishna Chaturdashi and Amavasya. The one worth knowing by name is Vishti, better known as Bhadra, which is widely avoided for auspicious beginnings.

Vaara — the weekday and its graha. The seven vaaras are ruled in order by Sun (Ravivara), Moon (Somavara), Mars (Mangalavara), Mercury (Budhavara), Jupiter (Guruvara), Venus (Shukravara) and Saturn (Shanivara). The ruling graha colours the whole day and is what fixes Rahu Kaal's position. One detail catches people out: in the Vedic reckoning a day runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight. At 3 a.m. on Tuesday the panchang is still counting Monday.

Every timing on this page is derived from two moments: your local sunrise and your local sunset. Nothing here comes from a fixed clock time, which is why a printed shubh muhurat table is only correct for the city it was printed for.

Rahu Kaal. Take the daylight span from sunrise to sunset and divide it into eight equal parts. One of those eighths belongs to Rahu, and which one depends on the weekday: 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. In India this works out to roughly ninety minutes, longer in summer and shorter in winter, because the parts scale with the length of the day. Rahu Kaal is observed by avoidance rather than by ritual — people delay signing agreements, starting a journey, opening a business or holding an engagement until it has passed. Work already under way is not stopped, and daily routine is unaffected. Observance is strongest in South India and steadily lighter as you go north.

Yamaganda. Calculated by the same eighth-part method, on a different weekday order, and treated the same way: a window to avoid for new beginnings. It is generally regarded as less severe than Rahu Kaal, and where the two are ranked, Rahu Kaal takes precedence.

Gulika Kalam. Also called Mandi, and associated with Shani. It uses the identical eighth-part derivation with its own weekday sequence, and is watched closely in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in particular. ProxaAI's panchang currently shows Rahu Kaal and Yamaganda; Gulika follows the same arithmetic from the same sunrise and sunset figures.

Abhijit Muhurta. The favourable counterpart, and the most useful entry on the page. Classical texts divide daylight into fifteen muhurtas; Abhijit is the eighth — the middle one — so it sits centred on solar noon and runs about forty-eight minutes. It is the default answer when someone needs a shubh muhurat today and has no time to consult anyone: a short, dependable window for signing, launching, buying or beginning. Some traditions set it aside on Wednesdays.

Brahma Muhurta. The last of the night's muhurtas, ending forty-eight minutes before sunrise and beginning ninety-six minutes before it — a forty-eight-minute window in the dark before dawn. It is prescribed for meditation, japa, pranayama and study rather than for worldly transactions. Because it is pinned to sunrise, it shifts through the year and by city exactly as everything else here does.

Two panchangs for the same date can disagree, and usually neither is wrong — they were computed for different places.

Tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana are geocentric. They depend only on the Sun-Moon geometry, so the instant a tithi ends is the same instant everywhere on Earth; only the clock time you write it down as changes. The muhurta windows are different in kind. Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda, Gulika, Abhijit and Brahma Muhurta are all built from local sunrise and sunset, so they move with your latitude and longitude.

India makes this unusually visible. The country spans nearly thirty degrees of longitude but runs on a single clock set to 82.5°E, so the sun rises more than an hour earlier in Kolkata than in Dwarka while both read the same IST. A Rahu Kaal window copied from a Chennai calendar is simply wrong in Amritsar. Latitude adds the second effect: the further from the equator, the more day length swings between summer and winter, which stretches and compresses every eighth-part window with it.

There is a subtler consequence too. Because the Vedic day begins at sunrise, the tithi that names today is whichever one is running at your sunrise. Near a tithi boundary, two cities can legitimately label the same date with different tithis. This is why ProxaAI recomputes the panchang for your detected location instead of serving one national table.