Varjyam & Amrit Kalam (棄時甘露時)

The Star's Own Poison and Nectar — the Daily Panchang's Avoid-Window

Overview

Open any Telugu or Tamil panchang and two lines sit beside the day's nakshatra: Varjyam — the span to reject — and Amrit Kalam, the nectar window. The idea is elegantly precise: every lunar mansion the Moon crosses carries, at fixed fractions of its own duration, one poisoned stretch and one blessed one. Aśvinī's varjyam opens at its 50th ghati, its amrit at the 42nd; Anurādhā turns hostile early, at the 10th; and Mūla — always the exception — carries two varjyam windows, at the 20th and the 56th. Because the windows are fractions of the star's span, their clock length breathes with the Moon's speed: about an hour and a half on an average day, longer when the Moon runs slow. South Indian practice treats Varjyam as one of the day's hard avoid-windows — journeys, purchases, beginnings all wait for it to pass — and the Amrit Kalam as its mirror, a portable pocket of favor. askTIAN computes both for every star touching the day, from real lunar astronomy, with the classical table double-sourced and reconciled in the test suite.

Origin & history

The varjyam table belongs to the working panchang tradition of South India — the calculation manuals behind the printed almanacs, transmitted in works like Karanam Ramakumar's 'Panchangam Calculations'. Each of the 27 nakshatras has a fixed start-ghati out of its own sixty: the moment its 'expelled portion' (thyajya, varjyam) begins, and separately the moment its nectar begins. The window always lasts four of the star's ghatis — one-fifteenth of its span. The numbers are not derivable from a formula; they are a received table, which is exactly why askTIAN ships them double-sourced: the PyJHora reference implementation's fraction map and the classical published ghati table are embedded independently in the test suite and reconciled cell-for-cell — they agree exactly, for all 27 stars, including Mūla's double window.

Varjyam never left daily life: it is printed in every South Indian calendar, announced in temple schedules, and is one of the most-checked fields on the online panchang services — squarely beside Rahu Kala in practical weight. The subtlety implementations fumble is that varjyam is keyed to the STAR, not the calendar date: a nakshatra that begins in the afternoon may place its varjyam after midnight, so the window prints on the next calendar day — and a fast Moon can fit parts of three stars into one vedic day. askTIAN handles this the way the printed panchangs do: it root-finds every star span touching the day from sunrise to the next sunrise on the same sidereal ephemeris as its panchanga engine, places each star's windows at their classical ghatis, and flags which fall inside the day — including the ones that spill past midnight.

How it works

Give the engine a date, coordinates and timezone. It finds the vedic day's boundaries with the shared gold-tested sunrise solver, then walks the Moon's nakshatra spans across it — the star running at sunrise (whose span began the previous day) and every successor until the next sunrise — root-finding each span boundary to the minute on the Lahiri sidereal ephemeris. For each star it places the Amrit Kalam at its amrit ghati and the Varjyam at its varjyam ghati (two windows for Mūla), each lasting exactly one-fifteenth of that star's actual duration, and reports start and end as local clock times with a withinDay flag. Pass an HH:MM and the response says whether that instant sits in varjyam, amrit kalam, or neither — varjyam winning ties, as the cautious tradition would. Every piece of the geometry is locked by tests: the double-sourced table, the fractional placement, the D/15 duration, Moon-plausible span lengths, chronological chaining, and the gold-day ordering on the panchanga-verified Delhi Jyeshtha day.

Good for

Use cases

The Panchang Day Card

One call fills the two lines every South Indian panchang prints — Varjyam from/to, Amrit Kalam from/to — for the user's own coordinates, with spillover past midnight handled the way the printed page does.

The Avoid-Window Overlay

Layer varjyam spans over choghadiya and Rahu Kala in one timeline strip: three independent avoid-systems, one visual answer to 'when should I not start this today?'

The Nectar Notifier

Push a gentle alert when the Amrit Kalam opens — a naturally recurring, tradition-grounded engagement moment that arrives at a different time every day because the Moon does.

The Muhurta Cross-Check

Before confirming an election chosen by panchaka or tarabala, verify it dodges the varjyam window — the final filter a working astrologer applies.

Key terms

Varjyam (Thyajya)
The star's 'portion to be rejected' — a window opening at the star's classical ghati and lasting 4 of its 60 ghatis, avoided for new undertakings.
Amrit Kalam
The star's nectar window — same geometry as varjyam at a different ghati, and favorable rather than avoided.
Ghati
One-sixtieth of the star's own span here (not a fixed 24 minutes): the windows are FRACTIONS of the nakshatra's actual duration, so their clock length varies with the Moon's speed.
The Start-Ghati Table
The received per-star table (Aśvinī 50, Bharaṇī 24 … Revati 30 for varjyam) — double-sourced from the PyJHora reference map and the classical published table, reconciled as a test.
D/15 Duration
Every window lasts 4 ghatis of the star's 60 — one-fifteenth of the span — roughly 1h40m on an average lunar day.
Mūla's Double Window
The one star with two varjyams (ghatis 20 and 56), a special case the reference map, the classical table and this engine all agree on.
Star-Keyed, Not Date-Keyed
Windows belong to the nakshatra span, which rarely aligns with the calendar day — the engine reports every span touching the vedic day and flags what falls inside.
The Vedic Day
Local sunrise to the next sunrise — the frame the report covers, matching the printed panchang's day.

API

The askTIAN Varjyam API root-finds every nakshatra span touching the vedic day on the shared sidereal Lahiri ephemeris, places each star's Varjyam and Amrit Kalam at their classical start-ghatis with the exact D/15 duration, handles Mūla's double window and after-midnight spillover, and reports an instant's status on demand. The start-ghati table is double-sourced — the PyJHora reference map and the classical published ghati table, embedded independently and reconciled cell-for-cell in the test suite. Window geometry, span plausibility and gold-day ordering are all locked as tests. Pure compute, no LLM, 2 TIAN.

Endpoint: POST /trpc/muhurta.varjyam — 2 TIAN Points. See the API documentation and Playground.