Term
Panchangaपञ्चाङ्ग
Five-limb Vedic almanac
The classical Vedic almanac, built from five elements — tithi, nakshatra, vara, yoga, and karana — that together describe the astronomical and traditional character of a day. Every value is sunrise-anchored and location-specific.
Panchanga means “five limbs” — the five elements that make up the traditional Hindu almanac. They are the tithi (lunar day), vara (weekday), the nakshatra (lunar mansion), yoga (a function of the combined Sun–Moon longitude), and karana (a half-tithi). Each is a precise astronomical quantity rather than a symbolic abstraction.
All five reduce to the positions of the Sun and Moon. The tithi and karana follow the elongation of the Moon from the Sun; the nakshatra follows the Moon’s longitude alone; the yoga follows the sum of the two longitudes; and the vara is simply the civil weekday. Because these quantities change continuously, the value “of the day” is, by convention, the one in effect at sunrise — the classical start of the Vedic day. SahiKundli also shows the time at which each element ends, so the boundaries are explicit rather than hidden behind a single label.
A panchanga is only meaningful for a specific place and moment. Sunrise, and therefore every sunrise-anchored value, differs by location, and the times are reported in each location’s own timezone — so the same calendar date produces a different panchanga in Mumbai than in New York. SahiKundli computes all five limbs from first principles using the Swiss Ephemeris with the Lahiri ayanamsa, rather than reading them from a fixed printed table.
Used on SahiKundli for: the daily panchanga page and the live homepage panel, including the detection of Ekadashi, Purnima, and Amavasya. See Panchanga computation for the calculation method.