Panchang today in Sydney

How to read this panchang

A panchang — literally “five limbs” — is the Hindu almanac for a single day. Its five limbs are the weekday, the lunar day, the Moon’s nakshatra, the nitya yoga and the karaṇa. Everything on this page is computed for Sydney from the actual positions of the Sun and Moon, not copied from a printed table, so you can check any value against your own almanac.

The day starts at sunrise

The panchang day runs from one sunrise to the next, not from midnight. Each limb is named as it stands at sunrise, followed by every change before the next sunrise and the time it happens. That is why a time after midnight is shown with the next date beside it — it still belongs to this panchang day.

The five limbs

Tithi is the lunar day: each 12° the Moon gains on the Sun. There are thirty in a lunar month, fifteen in the waxing (shukla) fortnight ending at Purnima and fifteen in the waning (krishna) fortnight ending at Amavasya. Nakshatra is the Moon’s lunar mansion, one of twenty-seven of 13°20′ each. Yoga here means the nitya yoga, from the sum of the Sun’s and Moon’s longitudes. Karaṇa is half a tithi. Vāra is the weekday, counted from sunrise.

Rahu kalam, Yamaganda and Gulika

Daylight is divided into eight equal parts, and one part is assigned to each by weekday. Rahu kalam is widely avoided for beginning new work, especially in south India; Yamaganda and Gulika are observed more in some regions than others. They are traditions about when to start things, not warnings about the day — nothing bad is predicted for anyone who is simply going about their life.

Muhurtas and choghadiya

A muhurta is one fifteenth of the day or the night. Abhijit, the muhurta around local noon, is traditionally favoured for beginnings; Brahma muhurta, before dawn, for study and prayer. Choghadiya divides day and night into eight parts each and is widely used in Gujarat and western India to pick a time for travel or a purchase.

How it is computed

Positions come from the same astronomy engine as our birth chart, accurate to well under an arcminute. Nakshatra and yoga use the Lahiri ayanamsa, the standard in Indian almanacs. Sunrise and sunset are for the Sun’s upper edge with standard refraction, the almanac convention; moonrise and moonset follow the same convention, and printed almanacs can differ by a few minutes for the Moon because their conventions differ. The lunar month is given both ways — amanta (new moon to new moon, used in the south and west) and purnimanta (full moon to full moon, used in most of the north). See our methodology for the details.