Guides to Vedic timing
Every date table on this site is the output of rules that are written down somewhere, and the point of these guides is that you should be able to read those rules for yourself rather than take a rating on trust. Each one takes a single mechanism — a window, a limb of the panchang, a seasonal bar, a personal check — and explains what it is computed from, what it genuinely decides, and where it stops being useful.
They are written to be checkable. Where a rule varies between texts or regions, the guide says so instead of quietly picking one reading; where this site’s own scorer simplifies, the simplification is named in the guide that covers it. Reference tables carry the classical data itself â the eight Choghadiya characters, the twenty-seven yogas, the hundred and eight naming syllables â so you can compare them against your family almanac line by line.
Read at New Delhi sunrise (05:42) on 31 July 2026: Krishna Dvitiya, Dhanishta, Saubhagya yoga, Taitila karana.
All 20 guides
- Choghadiya — What Choghadiya is, what each of the seven window characters means, why day and night run different sequences, and where the system stops being useful.
- Rahu Kaal — Rahu Kaal is an eighth of the daylight assigned by weekday — not a planetary transit. How the eighth is chosen, why the clock times drift, and the narrow set of acts it really bars.
- Abhijit Muhurat — Abhijit is the eighth of the fifteen daytime muhurtas — about forty-eight minutes around true local noon. How to compute it, why Wednesday is treated differently, and what it can and cannot rescue.
- Amrit Kaal — Amrit Kaal is derived from the nakshatra in force, not from the Sun — which is why it moves independently of noon, varies in length, and is printed differently by different almanacs.
- The five limbs — Tithi, vara, nakshatra, yoga and karana — what each limb is computed from, how fast it changes, and which questions it is actually competent to answer.
- Tithi classes — The thirty tithis fall into five repeating classes of three. What each class is held to suit, why the Rikta days are dropped from almost every muhurat, and where the classes are overruled.
- Nakshatras and gana — The full nakshatra table with each star’s gana and its classical activity class — the two groupings that decide which stars a given rite may use.
- Padas and naming — Each nakshatra divides into four padas of 3°20′, and each pada carries a syllable. How the naming sound is derived, why it needs an exact birth time, and what the padas do beyond names.
- Vara and hora — Why the weekday order is what it is, how the hora sequence falls out of the same arithmetic, and how far a planetary hour can actually be pushed.
- The 27 yogas — The nitya yoga is the sum of the Sun and Moon longitudes cut into twenty-seven parts. The full list, which ones are treated as defects, and why a yoga rarely chooses a date but often cancels one.
- Karana — Sixty half-tithis, eleven names, seven that rotate and four that appear once each lunar month. What the karana adds to an election, and why almost all of its weight sits on Vishti.
- Bhadra — Bhadra is Vishti karana under its personal name. The residence rule that decides whether a given Bhadra affects the earth at all, and the acts every tradition exempts from it.
- Panchaka — Panchaka runs from the second half of Dhanishta through Revati. The five specific works it names, the weekday subtypes, and why it is far narrower than most summaries suggest.
- Kharmas and Malmas — One is solar, one is a naming habit, and one is a leap month produced by the arithmetic of the lunisolar calendar. Why they close the calendar and how to tell them apart.
- Chaturmas — From Devshayani to Prabodhini Ekadashi the major rites pause. What the four months each ask you to set aside, which acts continue, and how it interacts with the muhurat calendar.
- Combustion (asta) — When Venus or Jupiter comes too close to the Sun it stops being visible, and the marriage calendar stops with it. The degree limits, the typical durations, and what the bar does and does not cover.
- Tarabala and Chandrabala — Both are counted from YOUR birth Moon, which is why no printed muhurat list contains them. The nine taras, the sign-distance rule, and how to run them against a shortlisted date.
- Ekadashi and vrat days — Twenty-four Ekadashis a year, twenty-six in a leap year, and two rules that decide which calendar date each one lands on. Why two households can fast a day apart and both be right.
- Muhurat, the word — Muhurta is a unit of forty-eight minutes before it is a chosen moment. The thirty daytime and night-time muhurtas, and the actual order in which a practitioner narrows a date.
- Why it differs by city — India keeps one clock across thirty degrees of longitude. What that does to sunrise, to every window derived from it, and to the tithi a date is labelled with.
What these guides deliberately do not do
They do not read your chart. Not one of the mechanisms explained here knows your birth star, your Moon sign, your running planetary period or the lagna that would rise at the hour you pick, and several of the pages say plainly that those are the factors that actually decide between two open dates. Timings are computed from a Lahiri sidereal ephemeris at New Delhi unless a page states otherwise, and the honest use of everything here is to narrow a year down to a handful of candidates worth taking to someone who can weigh the rest.
For a full personalised muhurat matched to your own birth chart, ask Soma on AskSoma.