When is Makar Sankranti?

A solar rule in a lunar calendar

Nearly every festival on this site is a rule over the lunar calendar: a month, a fortnight, a tithi, and a moment of day at which that tithi must be running. Makar Sankranti is none of those things.

It is a solar ingress. It occurs when the Sun crosses from Dhanu (Sagittarius) into Makara (Capricorn) in the sidereal zodiac. There is no tithi in the rule and no paksha, which is why it sits apart from everything else in this calendar — and why its date is so stable.

The twelve sankrantis of the year are the Sun’s twelve sign entries. Makar is the one that carries a major festival; the other eleven are listed here too, as Mesha, Karka and so on, because each of them marks a real boundary in the solar calendar even where no festival attaches.

Why not the solstice

This is the question the date actually raises, and the answer is worth stating carefully because a great deal of confused writing exists about it.

The winter solstice — the shortest day — is a tropical event. It is defined by the Sun’s position relative to the Earth’s equator and it lands on 21 or 22 December. Makar Sankranti is a sidereal event, defined by the Sun’s position relative to the fixed stars.

Those two frames drift apart. The Earth’s axis precesses through a full circle in roughly 25,800 years, so the tropical and sidereal zodiacs separate by about one degree every 72 years. The accumulated difference today is around 24 degrees, and since the Sun covers about a degree a day, that is about 24 days — which is exactly the gap between the solstice and mid-January.

The offset between the two frames is called the ayanamsha. We compute sankrantis using the Lahiri ayanamsha, which is the Indian government standard and the default throughout this site. A different ayanamsha shifts the ingress moment by hours and can, in a close year, move the civil date by a day.

Which civil day

The rule here is simple and worth being explicit about: we assign the sankranti to the civil date on which the ingress occurs, in the local timezone of the place the calendar is computed for.

Classical practice adds a further step — a punya kala, the auspicious period around the ingress, whose extent determines the day of observance when the crossing happens near dawn or after sunset. That refinement is not applied here. When the ingress falls late at night, an almanac using a punya kala rule may therefore publish the following day. This is the main reason to see a one-day difference on this particular festival.

What we do not compute

We compute the ingress and give you its date. We do not compute the punya kala extent, the maha punya kala within it, the snana or daan muhurats, or the regional harvest observances — Pongal, Magh Bihu, Maghi, Uttarayan — that are built on this same moment but keep their own conventions and durations.

For the day’s own timings in your city, open the panchang; for the auspicious-window tables generally, the muhurat hub.