What Is Panchang?

Pick your city and look up when today's Tithi begins and ends; it often changes partway through the day, so the Tithi shown at midnight may not apply to the afternoon.

A Panchang is the traditional Hindu almanac, printed as a booklet or wall calendar and now widely available in apps. The word comes from Sanskrit pancha, five, and anga, limb, because each day is described by five measured factors. Families, temples and priests consult it to set festival dates, fasts, naming ceremonies, weddings and the daily rhythm of worship.

It matters because festivals follow lunar days rather than fixed civil dates, and the Panchang shows where those lunar days fall in an ordinary week.

Four limbs come from the sidereal positions of the Sun and Moon, measured against the fixed stars; the fifth is the weekday.

A tithi is counted from the new Moon. Each time the Moon gains another 12 degrees on the Sun, a new tithi begins, so 360 degrees make 30 tithis. The first 15 form Shukla paksha, the bright or waxing half, ending with Purnima, the full Moon. The second 15 form Krishna paksha, the dark or waning half, ending with Amavasya, the new Moon.

Names repeat in each half, from Pratipada, the first, to Chaturdashi, the fourteenth; Ekadashi, the eleventh, is a common fasting day.

Because the Moon's speed varies, tithis average about 23.6 hours (29.5 days divided by 30) but run noticeably shorter or longer. Occasionally one is never current at sunrise, or one spans two sunrises; regional calendars handle these skipped and repeated tithis in their own ways.

A karana is half a tithi, 6 degrees of Moon-Sun separation, so a lunar month holds 60 of them. Only 11 names cover all 60. Seven movable karanas, Bava, Balava, Kaulava, Taitila, Garaja, Vanija and Vishti, repeat eight times for 56 halves. Four fixed karanas fill the rest: Kimstughna takes the first half of the first tithi, and Shakuni, Chatushpada and Naga take the last three halves of the month.

A yoga adds the sidereal longitudes of the Sun and Moon, reduces the total to a 360-degree circle and divides it into 27 steps of 13 degrees 20 minutes. The series runs from Vishkambha to Vaidhriti.

The four lunar limbs change at the same instant everywhere, because they depend only on the Sun and Moon. What differs by place is the clock time of that instant and the local sunrise, so a tithi ending at 11 p.m. in one city may end after midnight, on the next date, a few time zones east.

Traditional almanacs run the day from sunrise to sunrise, and the tithi current at sunrise usually names the whole day for ritual purposes, even if it ends at 9 a.m.

The Today Panchang and Tithi Today tools on this site use the local civil date instead. They give the tithi, nakshatra with its pada (a quarter of the mansion), yoga and karana at local midnight, using the Lahiri sidereal reference, then list every verified change within that date; the weekday follows the civil date. Traditions vary, so if your family calendar names days by the sunrise tithi, compare the change times with sunrise.

Take a constructed date. At local midnight the sidereal Sun stands at 100 degrees and the Moon at 191 degrees, so the Moon is 91 degrees ahead. Dividing 91 by 12 gives 7.58: seven tithis are complete and the eighth, Ashtami, is running in the bright half.

Dividing 91 by 6 gives 15.17, so fifteen halves are complete and the sixteenth, the second half of Ashtami, is current; on the movable cycle that is Bava. The Moon's 191 degrees divided by 13 degrees 20 minutes gives 14.33, so the Moon is in the 15th mansion, Swati, in its second pada. Sun plus Moon is 291 degrees, inside the 22nd yoga, Sadhya, which spans 280 to about 293.3 degrees.

Ashtami ends when the separation reaches 96 degrees, 5 degrees away. At the Moon's average gain of about 12 degrees a day, that takes about 10 hours, so Navami and the karana Balava would begin near 10 a.m., and the midnight row would be wrong by afternoon. Real change times come from exact positions, not this average.

A short routine keeps one row from standing in for the whole day.

1. Choose the city where the activity happens, not where you live, if the two differ.
2. Note sunrise and sunset, since daily windows such as Rahu Kalam are cut from that daylight span.
3. Read the tithi and paksha in force at the start of the day, then find the time it changes.
4. Do the same for the nakshatra, which changes about once a day, and glance at the yoga and karana.
5. Decide which convention you are following, civil date or sunrise, and check a family or temple calendar if a ritual depends on it.

Most readers next want the windows inside the day: Rahu Kalam, Yamaganda and Gulika, eighth-of-daylight segments traditionally avoided for new starts; Choghadiya, eight labeled blocks each for day and night; and Abhijit Muhurat, on this site the eighth of fifteen equal daylight parts.

The other common step is Muhurat, choosing a time for a purpose such as a wedding. It weighs the five limbs with the purpose and often the birth charts involved, which is why a priest or experienced practitioner usually sets it. The Panchang supplies the raw material, not the decision.

Is a Panchang the same as a Hindu calendar? It is the detailed daily layer of one. Regional calendars differ on whether a month ends at the new Moon or the full Moon and on when the year begins, but they share the five limbs.

Can two Panchangs disagree? Yes. Programs use different sidereal references, sunrise definitions and rounding, so change times can differ by a few minutes, and a sunrise-based almanac may name a different tithi for the day than a midnight-based one.

Does the Panchang say whether a plan will work? No. It gives traditional labels for one place and time. Preparation, people and circumstances shape how a plan goes, and urgent or necessary tasks never need to wait for a better label.

A Panchang gives traditional timing labels for one location; it cannot say whether a plan will succeed, and another city's times may differ.