How SubhMuhurat computes a muhurat

This page states exactly what the date tables on this site are, exactly what they are not, and the arithmetic in between. The short version is that they are a panchang shortlist and not a personal verdict — and the long version is worth reading before you trust a rating.

The two tiers, stated first

Tier one is the panchang layer. It asks whether a day clears the classical tests that need nothing but the sky: the tithi and its fortnight, the weekday and its lord, the nakshatra the Moon stands in at sunrise, the yoga, the karana, the sidereal sign the Sun occupies, and whether Venus or Jupiter is heliacally set. Every table on this site is tier one, computed end to end, with no gaps filled by editorial judgement.

Tier two is the chart layer. It asks whether a day that passed tier one is right for a particular person and a particular hour: which lagna rises then, how the Moon sits relative to the querent's own birth Moon, which dasha and antardasha are running, whether a dosha vetoes it, and whether the hour collides with that city's Rahu Kaal. Tier two is not computed anywhere on this site. It is the muhurat finder's job and Soma's job, because it needs a birth chart and a chosen hour, and a static page has neither.

These are panchang-shortlisted dates, not a personal verdict. Each date below clears the classical tithi, vara, nakshatra, yoga and karana tests for this occasion, computed with a Lahiri sidereal ephemeris at New Delhi sunrise. The lagna rising at the hour you actually choose, your own birth chart (Chandra bala, running dasha, any dosha) and the day’s Rahu Kaal are NOT checked here — that layer only exists once a date is run against a real chart on the muhurat finder or with Soma.

Where the numbers come from

Sunrise and sunset use a NOAA solar-position model at the exact latitude and longitude of the city, with the standard −0.833° geometric altitude that accounts for refraction and the solar disc's semi-diameter. No elevation correction is applied, which matters for hill towns: at a thousand metres, true sunrise runs roughly two minutes ahead of the sea-level figure printed here. Planetary longitudes are computed tropically and converted to the sidereal frame by subtracting the Lahiri ayanamsa. Other schools — Raman, Krishnamurti, Fagan-Bradley — differ by a degree or more, which is enough to move a nakshatra boundary by hours; if your family panchang disagrees with a boundary here by minutes, that is the first place to look, and neither book is wrong.

Worked from the same computation that renders the occasion pages: New Delhi on 31 July 2026 has sunrise 05:42 and sunset 19:13 IST, a daylight span of 811 minutes. The five limbs read at that sunrise are Krishna Dvitiya, Friday, Dhanishta, Saubhagya yoga and Taitila karana. Every kaal window is one eighth of that span — 101 minutes today — which is why Rahu Kaal is never the same length twice and never the same clock time in two cities.

The bars, which run before any scoring

A day is thrown out before it is ever scored if any of the following holds, and the page reports the reason rather than silently dropping it. The occasion's barred solar months (Kharmas, for instance, is the Sun in Sagittarius, and marriage also pauses through Pisces). The wrong fortnight, where a rite is kept to one paksha. A rikta tithi — the 4th, 9th and 14th of either fortnight, the "empty" days — unless the act is one of the few that relaxes it. Amavasya. Vishti karana at sunrise, better known as Bhadra. Any of the 8 inauspicious nitya yogas: Vyatipata, Vaidhriti, Parigha, Vyaghata, Ganda, Atiganda, Shoola and Vajra. A nakshatra barred for that act, which by default means the sharp and fierce classes, except where a rite explicitly reclaims one. A barred weekday. Panchaka, where the act is one the texts keep out of it. And combustion: Venus within 10° of the Sun (8° when retrograde, since a retrograde Venus sets earlier) or Jupiter within 11°, for the rites that require those two visible.

The scoring, and what a rating means

A surviving day scores out of ten: three points if the nakshatra is one of the occasion's classical stars, two if the tithi within its fortnight is favoured, two if the weekday lord suits the act, one for the preferred paksha, one when Sarvartha Siddhi Yoga forms from that weekday-and-nakshatra pair, and one for a classically auspicious yoga. 8 and above is shown as Excellent, 6 to 7 as Good, and anything below 6 is not listed at all. A rating is a measure of how many classical conditions coincide, not a prediction of an outcome — a date cannot cause a result, and no page here will say it does.

What this method cannot see

It cannot see your chart, and that is the single largest omission rather than a footnote: the lagna at the chosen hour is arguably the most weighted factor in classical electional astrology, and it is absent here by construction. It cannot see Chandra bala or Tara bala, both of which need your birth star. It does not overlay the day's Rahu Kaal or Choghadiya onto a chosen hour — those are per-city and live on their own pages, and an otherwise excellent date can still hold a bad hour. It does not know your family's own practice, which outranks anything written here when the two differ. And it reads every limb at New Delhi sunrise, so a boundary that falls close to dawn can land differently for a city several degrees east or west.

Written and maintained by Savan Vyas across 20 occasions and 20 guides. Boundary times are found by bisection to about a minute, which is finer than the ayanamsa question itself, so quoting seconds anywhere on this site would be false precision. A rule applied wrongly here is a bug — see Contact.

For a full personalised muhurat matched to your own birth chart, ask Soma on AskSoma.