What Is a Panchang?

The Name Is the Structure

Panchang (પંચાંગ) comes from pancha, five, and anga, limb. It is a five-part almanac, and the five parts are fixed:

Four of the five are astronomical positions. Only vaar, the weekday, is a plain civil count.

1. Tithi — the Lunar Day

The headline figure, and the one most people check. A tithi is the interval in which the Moon gains 12 degrees on the Sun, and it ends at a specific clock time rather than at midnight. Because tithis run from about 19 to 26 hours long, they occasionally skip or repeat.

This has its own guide: what is a tithi, with the full list of the thirty names in Gujarati.

2. Vaar — the Weekday

The seven-day week, which India shares with most of the world and which is genuinely ancient in both. Each day carries a planetary ruler, and that ruler matters more than you might expect: it determines which choghadiya the day opens with and when rahukaal falls.

Note that in panchang usage a "day" runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight. An event at 1am on Thursday morning belongs to Wednesday as far as the panchang is concerned.

3. Nakshatra — the Moon's Mansion

The ecliptic is divided into 27 equal segments of 13°20′ each, the nakshatras or lunar mansions. The nakshatra of the day is whichever one the Moon is sitting in, and since the Moon covers roughly one nakshatra a day, it changes about once every 24 hours — again at a clock time, which the panchang states.

Nakshatra is what a birth chart uses to fix your janma rashi and the traditional first letter of your name. That is covered in nakshatras and janma rashi.

4. Yoga — the Combined Longitude

Yoga is the least intuitive of the five, and the one most people skip. Take the Sun's longitude and the Moon's longitude, add them together, and divide the result into 27 segments of 13°20′. Whichever segment the sum falls in is the yoga.

It is a purely computed quantity with no direct visual counterpart in the sky. The 27 yogas have names — Vishkambha, Priti, Ayushman and so on — and a handful, notably Vyatipata and Vaidhriti, are traditionally treated as inauspicious. In everyday use, most people check tithi and nakshatra and leave yoga to the priest.

5. Karana — Half a Tithi

A karana is half a tithi: the Moon gaining 6 degrees on the Sun rather than 12. There are two karanas in every tithi, so sixty in a lunar month.

Those sixty are filled by eleven names. Four are sthira (fixed) and appear only once each per month, around the new moon: Shakuni, Chatushpada, Naga and Kimstughna. The other seven are chara (movable) — Bava, Balava, Kaulava, Taitila, Garaja, Vanija and Vishti — and rotate through the remaining fifty-six slots eight times over.

Vishti, also called Bhadra, is the one to know. It is widely avoided for beginning auspicious work, and a panchang will usually mark its start and end times explicitly.

What Else Is on the Page

Beyond the five limbs, a full daily panchang typically carries:

• Sunrise and sunset, listed per city, because everything time-based downstream depends on them. A Gujarati panchang normally gives Ahmedabad, Surat and Mumbai at minimum.
• Choghadiya for day and night — eight periods each, derived directly from sunrise and sunset. See choghadiya explained.
• Rahukaal and the other inauspicious windows, yamaganda and gulika kaal.
• Graha positions: which rashi each planet currently occupies.
• Panchak status, and whether the day is a vrat, ekadashi or festival.
• Era markers: Vikram Samvat, Shake, the ayana (uttarayan or dakshinayan), the rutu or season, and the Jovian year name.
• Bank status, in the practical modern panchangs — whether banks are open that day.

How to Actually Read One

You do not need all five limbs for most purposes. In descending order of everyday usefulness:

1. Tithi and festival — is today ekadashi, is it a vrat, is there a festival?
2. Choghadiya — which windows today are considered good for starting something.
3. Rahukaal — the window most people avoid for anything new.
4. Nakshatra — if you are matching a muhurat or a birth detail.
5. Yoga and karana — mostly when a priest is fixing a formal muhurat.

Everything above the line is a two-second check. Everything below it is specialist. That is why the app puts tithi, nakshatra, choghadiya and today's festivals on the home screen, and keeps the full panchang one tap away.

Frequently Asked Questions