What you can do

• Review tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana, sunrise, and sunset.
• Use local timing instead of a generic calendar assumption.
• See personalized day quality when birth details are available.
• Move from Panchang into Muhurat and festival planning.

How it works

1. 1. Choose location

   Use your current city or a saved location for local Panchang timing.

2. 2. Read the five limbs

   Review tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana, and weekday together.

3. 3. Plan the day

   Use auspicious and inauspicious windows before opening Muhurat or Festivals.

The five limbs, and what each one measures

Panchang means five limbs, and each limb is a separate measurement rather than a verdict. Tithi is the lunar day, marked off every twelve degrees the Moon gains on the Sun, giving thirty tithis in a lunar month and fifteen in each paksha. Nakshatra is the lunar mansion the Moon is passing through, one of twenty-seven, each divided into four padas. Yoga is a twenty-seven-fold value derived from the Sun and Moon positions taken together. Karana is half a tithi, so two of them fall inside every lunar day. Vara is simply the weekday. Read together, these five describe the texture of a day.

Why a Vedic day begins at sunrise, not midnight

The panchang day runs from sunrise to sunrise, which is why one calendar date can carry two different readings in two cities. Tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana each end at a specific clock time, and whichever one is running at your local sunrise is the one the day is named for. A tithi that ends at 6:10 in the morning may still be running where the sun rose at 5:54 and be over where it rose at 6:49. This is the most common reason two panchang sources disagree about a festival date, and it is why this page asks for a location instead of assuming one.

Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika are eighths of daylight

These three avoid-windows are not fixed clock times. The span from sunrise to sunset is divided into eight equal parts, and each of the three takes one of those parts, with the part depending on the weekday. Because the length of daylight changes through the year and with latitude, the length of each eighth changes too, so a ninety-minute Rahu Kaal is only ninety minutes on a twelve-hour day. Sanatani.ai computes all three from the real sunrise and sunset at your location, which is why these times will not match a table printed for a different city.

Abhijit Muhurta, and the one weekday it is missing

Abhijit is the eighth of the fifteen muhurtas that divide daylight. It falls around local noon and lasts one fifteenth of the daylight span, which is about forty-eight minutes when day and night are equal. Tradition treats it as the day's most dependable auspicious window when no other muhurat is available. On Wednesday it is not observed at all: it is held to be hostile to Mercury, the lord of that weekday, and its midday slot overlaps Wednesday's Rahu Kaal in any case. If you open this page on a Wednesday and find no Abhijit window, that absence is the correct answer rather than missing data.

Brahma Muhurta is not a fixed ninety-six minutes

The pre-dawn window kept for study, japa and practice is usually quoted as ninety-six to forty-eight minutes before sunrise. That is exact only at the equinox. Brahma Muhurta is properly the fourteenth of the fifteen muhurtas of the night, where the night is measured from the previous sunset to this morning's sunrise. It therefore stretches in winter and contracts in summer, and its true length depends on your latitude as well as the date. This page computes it from the actual length of the night rather than subtracting a fixed number of minutes from sunrise.

Vishti or Bhadra, the karana most day-planners skip

Of the eleven karanas, four are fixed and occur once each in a lunar month while seven repeat through it. One of the seven, Vishti, is better known as Bhadra, and it is traditionally avoided for beginnings: journeys, purchases, and the opening of ceremonies. Because a karana is only half a tithi, Bhadra usually covers part of a day rather than all of it, so the useful question is not whether Bhadra falls today but which hours it occupies. The day view names the window instead of marking a whole date unusable.

A public panchang and a personal one are different documents

Everything above holds for a location no matter who is reading it. Once a birth chart is attached, the same day gains a second layer. Tarabala counts the day's nakshatra from your own janma nakshatra to say whether the Moon is running through a supportive star for you in particular, and the day-quality reading weighs tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana and the ruling hora together. Two people in one city can share a panchang and still be advised differently, which is the point of reading a day against a chart rather than against a calendar.

Common questions