The five limbs of the panchang, and what each one decides
All five limbs, read at sunrise for the reference city — at New Delhi sunrise (05:42) on 31 July 2026 the five limbs read Krishna Dvitiya, Friday, Dhanishta, Saubhagya yoga and Taitila karana.
Five limbs, two engines
Panchanga means five limbs, and the almanac takes its name from them: tithi, vara, nakshatra, yoga and karana. It is not a horoscope and does not claim to be one. It is a daily statement of where the Sun and the Moon stand relative to each other and to the fixed stars, expressed in five traditional units, and everything else in a printed panchang — the kaal windows, the festival dates, the muhurat lists — is derived from those five plus the local sunrise.
Underneath, only two quantities are actually being measured. Three of the limbs (tithi, yoga, karana) come from the ANGULAR RELATIONSHIP between the Sun and the Moon; one (nakshatra) comes from the Moon’s position against the sidereal zodiac alone; and one (vara) comes from the Sun alone, in the form of the sunrise-to-sunrise day. Once you see that, the apparent redundancy of the system disappears — each limb is a different projection of the same two moving bodies.
One convention governs the whole thing: the panchang is read AT SUNRISE. Whichever tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana are in force at the moment the Sun’s upper limb clears the horizon in your location are the ones the day is labelled with, even if three of them change by mid-afternoon. That single rule is why a date can be Ekadashi in one city and Dashami in another a few hundred kilometres west.
What each limb is, at a glance
The five differ sharply in how fast they move and in what they are competent to decide, which is the practical reason a muhurat weighs them differently. A nakshatra rule is the backbone of most elections; a karana rule is almost always a veto rather than a preference.
| Limb | Computed from | Divisions | Changes roughly every | Chiefly governs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tithi | Moon minus Sun, in 12° steps | 30 per lunar month | 19–26 hours | The lunar date; fasts, festivals, the shape of a rite |
| Vara | The sunrise-to-sunrise day | 7 | 24 hours | The planetary lord of the day; the hora sequence; Rahu Kaal |
| Nakshatra | Moon’s sidereal longitude, in 13°20′ steps | 27 | 20–26 hours | The character of the day; most electional rules live here |
| Yoga | Sun plus Moon, in 13°20′ steps | 27 | ~22–24 hours | A same-day quality bonus or defect |
| Karana | Half a tithi | 11 names over 60 half-tithis | ~9–13 hours | Mostly one thing: whether Vishti (Bhadra) is in force |
The step sizes are exact; the durations are not, because both the Moon and the Sun move at varying speeds. A tithi can be as short as about nineteen hours or stretch past twenty-six.
Why they are not weighted equally
A common beginner error is to treat the five as a scorecard with equal columns. Classical practice does not. The nakshatra carries the most electional weight, because the great majority of specific rules — which stars suit a wedding, a first tonsure, a journey, a house entry — are stated as nakshatra lists. The tithi comes next, largely through its classes and through the Rikta days it excludes. The vara supplies the day lord and is usually a modifier rather than a decider.
The yoga and the karana behave differently again: they mostly act as vetoes. Nine yogas are treated as defects and a date sitting on one is generally dropped regardless of how good its nakshatra is, and the karana matters chiefly through Vishti, which suspends auspicious beginnings for the half-tithi it occupies. Neither is normally the reason a date is CHOSEN.
And all five together still describe only the day. The classical election then has to choose an HOUR, which brings in the rising sign, the placement of the Moon relative to it, and the aspects falling on the seventh house for a marriage or the tenth for a professional beginning. A panchang is the raw material of a muhurat, not the muhurat.
What a panchang cannot tell you
It cannot tell you whether the day suits YOU. Tarabala counts from your birth star, Chandrabala from your Moon sign, and both can turn an excellent public day into a poor personal one — neither appears anywhere in the five limbs. Nor does your running dasha, nor any dosha in your chart, nor the strength of the house that governs the act you are timing.
It also cannot resolve regional disagreement on its own. Whether a lunar month is named from full moon to full moon or from new moon to new moon changes the NAME of half the dates in the year without changing a single computed value; whether a festival follows the tithi at sunrise or the tithi at a particular hour of the rite splits families onto adjacent days. A panchang reports; it does not adjudicate between traditions.
This is worth stating because the tables on this site are panchang tables. They apply the classical rules for each occasion honestly and they compute the five limbs exactly — and they still produce a shortlist rather than a verdict. Running a shortlisted date against a real chart is a separate step, and it is the step that decides.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a panchang change the date at sunrise rather than at midnight?
Because the traditional day runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight. The five limbs are read at the moment of sunrise and that reading labels the whole day, which is also why a fast or a festival can appear on different calendar dates in two cities — the tithi in force at sunrise genuinely differed, and both almanacs are correct for their own location.
If a tithi ends at 10 a.m., is the afternoon a different day?
For labelling purposes, no — the day keeps the tithi it had at sunrise. For choosing an hour, yes, it matters a great deal: a rite that specifically requires that tithi should be completed before it ends, and several observances are explicitly timed to the tithi rather than to the calendar day. Good almanacs therefore print the ending time, not just the name.
Related guides
How this guide is maintained
Everything computed on this site â the sunrise and sunset behind every window on this page, and the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana behind the date tables â comes from a Lahiri sidereal ephemeris and a NOAA sunrise model applied to the exact coordinates of the city shown, with New Delhi as the reference city for anything not city-specific. Where this guide describes a rule that genuinely varies between texts, regions or family traditions, it says so in the paragraph rather than picking a side quietly, and where the site’s own date scorer takes a documented shortcut, the shortcut is named.
What no guide on this site can do is weigh your own chart. The tables here are a panchang shortlist — the classical tests a calendar can settle — and the personal layer that decides between the surviving dates is a separate step. Start with the occasion pages for computed dates, and see how we compute muhurat for the full method.
Written and maintained by Savan Vyas. A rule applied wrongly here is a bug, and corrections are genuinely welcome.
For a full personalised muhurat matched to your own birth chart, ask Soma on AskSoma.