Panchanga (五支曆)

The Hindu Daily Almanac — Five Limbs of Sacred Time

Overview

The Panchanga (पञ्चाङ्ग, literally 'five limbs') is the Hindu almanac — the most-consulted artifact in all of Indian astrology, opened every single day across the subcontinent to know what kind of day it is. Where a birth chart freezes the sky at one moment of life, the Panchanga reads the living calendar: it tells you the tithi (which lunar day it is), the vara (the weekday and its planetary ruler), the nakshatra (which of the Moon's twenty-seven mansions she occupies), the yoga (a luminary-combination quality) and the karana (the half of the lunar day) — the five limbs that together define a moment in sacred time. From those five, and from the day's sunrise and sunset, flow the auspicious and inauspicious windows that govern Hindu life: when to begin a venture, when to marry, when to travel, which hours to avoid. askTIAN computes the complete Panchanga for any date, time and place with exact sidereal astronomy, reports each limb both at the moment you ask and at the canonical sunrise that labels the day, and surfaces the classical day-quality windows — Rahu Kala, the Abhijit muhurta, the planetary hora — honestly, as a timekeeping and electional tradition rather than a prediction. It is the foundation the rest of our Vedic suite was built to stand on: where Jyotish reads the natal chart, Ashtakavarga its strengths and the Shodasha Varga its sixteen divisions, the Panchanga reads time itself.

Origin & history

The Panchanga descends from the Vedanga Jyotisha, the astronomical limb of the Vedas, and was given its enduring mathematical form in the Surya Siddhanta and the works of Aryabhata, Varahamihira and Bhaskara. Its five limbs each measure a different relationship between the Sun and the Moon. The tithi is the lunar day, defined as each 12° the Moon gains on the Sun — thirty tithis make a lunar month, fifteen in the waxing Shukla Paksha from new moon to full, fifteen in the waning Krishna Paksha back to new. The vara is the seven-day planetary week, each day ruled in turn by the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. The nakshatra is the Moon's position among the twenty-seven lunar mansions of 13°20' each, the oldest layer of Indian astronomy. The yoga is one of twenty-seven qualities derived from the combined longitude of Sun and Moon, and the karana is the half-tithi, of which there are eleven types — seven that rotate and four that are fixed near the new moon. These are not arbitrary: every limb is a closed-form function of two observable positions in the sky, which is why the Panchanga could be tabulated for centuries before modern computing.

For more than two thousand years the Panchanga has been the operating system of Hindu daily life. Festivals are dated by it — Diwali falls on the new-moon tithi of Kartika, the full-moon tithi of Vaishakha is Buddha Purnima — and no traditional wedding, housewarming, journey or business launch is fixed without consulting the muhurta, the auspicious window read from the day's five limbs. Two great computational schools long competed: the vakya tradition, which used memorised sentence-mnemonics to look up positions, and the drik or drik-ganita tradition, which insists on the true, observed positions of Sun and Moon. The drik method, vindicated by precise astronomy, is now the standard, and it is the method askTIAN uses. A handful of conventions still genuinely differ between published almanacs — the exact solar altitude taken for sunrise, and the precise instant chosen to label a day that spans a tithi-change — and these can shift a borderline element by a few minutes. askTIAN states its method as drik-ganita on the same Lahiri sidereal zodiac as the rest of its Vedic engines, documents the two knobs that affect borderline labels, reports each limb both at the exact instant and at sunrise, and cross-checks the whole calculation against a gold-standard chart with independently published longitudes rather than asking you to take its arithmetic on faith.

How it works

askTIAN converts the date, time, timezone and place to a single instant and computes the true longitudes of the Sun and Moon with its own Meeus-precision ephemeris, applying the Lahiri ayanamsa to reach the sidereal zodiac — the same path the Jyotish, Ashtakavarga and Varga endpoints use. From those two longitudes every limb follows in closed form. The tithi is ceil of the Moon-minus-Sun elongation over 12°, giving 1–30 with its paksha and its five-fold nature (the Nanda, Bhadra, Jaya, Rikta and Purna groups). The karana is the same elongation over 6°, mapping the sixty half-tithis onto the seven movable and four fixed karanas. The nakshatra and its pada come from the sidereal Moon, and the yoga from the sidereal SUM of Sun and Moon — a subtle but critical distinction the engine handles deliberately: tithi and karana depend on the difference of the two longitudes, so the ayanamsa cancels and they are frame-invariant, but the yoga depends on the sum, where the ayanamsa is load-bearing and a tropical figure would land several yoga-units off. The vara is derived from the Julian Day Number, sunrise-based, so an instant before dawn still belongs to the previous weekday. A built-in sunrise/sunset solver (using the standard −0.833° upper-limb altitude) then yields the day-quality windows — Rahu Kala, Yamaganda and Gulika Kala as eighths of the daytime keyed to the weekday, the Abhijit muhurta around solar noon, and the current planetary hora in Chaldean order over unequal day and night hours. Each limb is reported both at the query instant and at sunrise, and a transparent 0–100 emphasis score blends the tithi group, yoga and karana into a symbolic measure of the day's traditional favourability — never a probability. The whole calculation is locked against a published gold-standard chart and a battery of hard invariants.

Good for

Use cases

Daily Panchanga Widget

Send today's date and a location and the API returns the five limbs at sunrise — the way a printed almanac labels the day — plus sunrise, sunset and the day-quality windows. A clean, fully deterministic spine for a daily-almanac feature, no LLM required.

Muhurta Finder

Read the tithi nature (avoiding the inauspicious Rikta tithis and the Vishti karana), the yoga, and the Rahu Kala / Abhijit windows for a span of candidate days, and surface the most favourable hour to begin something — the core of Hindu electional astrology.

Festival & Observance Calendar

Because festivals are dated by tithi and paksha, an app can detect Purnima, Amavasya, Ekadashi and the rest directly from the engine's tithi output — Diwali on Kartika Amavasya, Buddha Purnima on the Vaishakha full moon — without a hardcoded festival table.

Layer Over Jyotish

Sharing the same sidereal chart, an app can show a person's natal Jyotish snapshot alongside the live Panchanga — 'who you are' beside 'what today is' — including which nakshatra the Moon transits today relative to the natal Moon, the basis of daily tarabala timing.

Key terms

Panchanga
Sanskrit for 'five limbs' (pancha + anga) — the Hindu almanac whose five elements (tithi, vara, nakshatra, yoga, karana) together define a moment in sacred time. The most-consulted document in Indian astrology, the basis of festival dating and muhurta election.
Tithi
The lunar day — each 12° the Moon gains on the Sun, numbered 1–30 across the lunar month. The fifteen waxing tithis form the Shukla Paksha (new to full moon), the fifteen waning ones the Krishna Paksha. Their five-fold nature (Nanda, Bhadra, Jaya, Rikta, Purna) grades each for auspiciousness — the Rikta tithis (4th, 9th, 14th) are avoided for new beginnings.
Nakshatra
One of the twenty-seven lunar mansions of 13°20' each, marking where the Moon sits on the sidereal zodiac. Each has a planetary lord and is divided into four padas of 3°20'. The oldest layer of Indian astronomy and the engine of daily and electional Vedic astrology.
Yoga
One of twenty-seven qualities derived from the combined (summed) sidereal longitude of Sun and Moon, each spanning 13°20'. Nine of the twenty-seven are inauspicious; Vyatipata and Vaidhriti are avoided entirely. Distinct from the planetary yogas of natal astrology.
Karana
Half a tithi (6° of elongation) — sixty per lunar month, mapping onto eleven karana types: seven movable ones that rotate (Bava through Vishti) and four fixed ones (Shakuni, Chatushpada, Naga, Kimstughna) clustered around the new moon. Vishti, also called Bhadra, is inauspicious.
Rahu Kala
An inauspicious window equal to one-eighth of the daytime, whose position shifts by weekday, during which new ventures are traditionally avoided. With Yamaganda and Gulika Kala it forms the trio of daily 'bad hours' the engine computes from sunrise and sunset.
Abhijit Muhurta
The most auspicious daytime muhurta, the eighth of fifteen equal divisions of the day, centred on solar noon and lasting roughly forty-eight minutes — favourable for almost any undertaking, except on Wednesdays when it is classically held to be malefic.
Hora
The planetary hour — the day and night each split into twelve unequal horas ruled by the seven planets in Chaldean order, the first hora of the day always governed by the weekday's lord. The root of the word 'horoscope' and the basis of hora-based timing.

API

The askTIAN Panchanga API computes the complete Hindu almanac for any date, time and place with exact, self-verifying astronomy: the five limbs (tithi with paksha and nature, vara with its planetary lord, nakshatra with pada and lord, yoga, and karana), each reported both at the query instant and at the canonical sunrise, plus sunrise, sunset and solar noon from a built-in solver. It adds the classical day-quality windows — Rahu Kala, Yamaganda and Gulika Kala, the Abhijit muhurta and the planetary hora — and a transparent 0–100 day-auspiciousness emphasis score, with a fixed-section LLM reading. The method is drik-ganita (true positions) on the Lahiri sidereal zodiac, the same chart the Jyotish, Ashtakavarga and Varga endpoints share. The critical convention asymmetry is handled correctly — tithi and karana are frame-invariant, the yoga applies the ayanamsa to the summed longitude — and the two borderline knobs (sunrise altitude, weekday convention) are documented. Intra-day transition timestamps and full electional rule-sets are out of scope and surfaced honestly. Verified against a gold-standard chart (20 Feb 2017, New Delhi) and a battery of hard invariants. Set interpretation:false for structured data only.

Endpoint: POST /trpc/panchanga.compute — 6 TIAN Points. See the API documentation and Playground.