Birth Panchang

What is the birth panchang?

Panch-anga means “five limbs”. The panchang is the Hindu almanac’s description of a day, and your birth panchang is that description for the day you were born, computed for the place you were born.

It is not the birth chart. The Lagna chart answers where were the planets at 06:40; the birth panchang answers what kind of day was that. The tradition treats the answer as meaningful — the tithi you were born under, your janma nakshatra, the weekday, the lunar month — and much of the ritual calendar of a life is counted from it.

The five limbs

All five come from the sidereal Sun and Moon and nothing else.

Each of tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana is reported with the time it ends, found by root-finding on the ephemeris rather than by assuming an average length. These things do not run to a fixed clock: a tithi can be anywhere from about 20 to 27 hours, because it depends on how fast the Moon happens to be pulling away from the Sun.

Sunrise is the reference — and what that means for you

This is the part worth understanding properly, because it is the one that surprises people.

The five limbs are evaluated at sunrise, at your birthplace, and the day carries those values from that sunrise to the next. This is the classical convention and it is what every printed panchang does. It is why the panchang can say “Dwitiya” for a day on which Dwitiya ended at 11am.

So if you were born in the evening, your birth panchang describes your day as the almanac would have named it — not the sky at your birth minute. Both are real answers; they are answers to different questions.

Where the distinction actually matters is the janma nakshatra. Your Vimshottari dasha is built from the Moon’s nakshatra at your birth moment, not at sunrise, and the Moon crosses a nakshatra boundary about once a day. For that one value, read the Moon’s row in Grah Stithi. We keep the panchang faithful to the sunrise convention rather than quietly re-pointing it at your birth time, because a panchang that disagrees with every almanac would be worse than one that needs this paragraph.

The panchang also lists the full sequence of tithis, nakshatras, yogas and karanas running across the day with their boundary times, so if a limb changed between sunrise and your birth you can see exactly when.

The month, season and year around the day

Beyond the five limbs, the birth panchang places the day in the larger cycles:

• Paksha — the waxing (Shukla) or waning (Krishna) fortnight.
• Masa — the lunar month, given in both the Amanta (new-moon-ending, southern) and Purnimanta (full-moon-ending, northern) reckonings, which differ by a month during Krishna paksha.
• Ritu — the season, one of the six.
• Ayana — the Sun’s northward (Uttarayana) or southward (Dakshinayana) course.
• Samvat — the year in the Vikram, Shaka and Gujarati eras, each with its Jovian-year (samvatsara) name.
• Sun sign and Moon sign — the rashis the luminaries occupied.
• Sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset for the birthplace.

The birth panchang also carries the day’s windows — Rahu Kaal, Gulika, Yamaganda — along with the Choghadiya and Hora tables, the Tarabalam and Chandrabalam lists, and any festivals that fell on the date.

Two honest limits

The samvat years are derived from the Gregorian year arithmetically — Vikram as year + 57, Shaka as year − 78, Gujarati as year + 56. That is correct for most of the year and wrong for births in the window before each era’s own new year, where the true samvat is one lower. If your birth date falls in the early months of the year and the samvat matters to you, check it against a printed panchang.

The masa is derived from the Sun’s sign rather than from the actual new moon either side of the date. For most dates this agrees with the lunar month; near a sankranti or an adhika (intercalary) month it can disagree, and it does not flag adhika masa at all.

We would rather name these than have you find them.

Birthplace, not birth country

Every time in the birth panchang is local to the birthplace, computed from its own latitude, longitude and timezone. The local civil time you enter is converted through the birthplace’s timezone database entry, so historical offsets and old daylight-saving rules are handled for you rather than being your problem.

Sunrise is a real sunrise for that spot on the earth. Two cities in the same timezone and the same country will show different panchang times, and if a limb was near its boundary at dawn, occasionally different limbs.

Notes on this panchang

• The five limbs are evaluated at true local sunrise at the birthplace.
• Sidereal Sun and Moon from the Swiss Ephemeris (Moshier); Lahiri ayanamsha by default, following your chart setting.
• End times are root-found, not interpolated from average lengths.
• The vara runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight.