Method
How this panchang is computed
A panchang is not an astronomical calculation. It is an astronomical calculation plus a convention, and the conventions genuinely differ — by minutes on a tithi, and by a whole month on the name of a festival. Everyone in this category picks one and shows you a number. This page is the number’s other half.
What this build used
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These are recommended defaults, not a ruling. Every one of them is a parameter the engine takes, and the value actually used comes back with the answer — which is why the line at the bottom of every page on this site is generated from the computation rather than typed next to it. A method line that can disagree with the numbers above it is worse than no method line.
Where panchangs actually disagree
Sunrise: upper limb or centre. The Sun is half a degree wide and the atmosphere lifts it about 34 arcminutes at the horizon. Taking the moment the first sliver appears rather than the moment the centre reaches the horizon is a difference of roughly four minutes — and since the vara begins at sunrise and rahu kaal, gulika, yamaganda, choghadiya and hora are all cuts of the sunrise-to-sunset interval, four minutes at sunrise is four minutes on everything.
Drik or vakya. Drik means the sky is computed as it is observed; vakya means it is read from the traditional verse tables, which are internally consistent and slowly drifting from the sky. Neither is a mistake — they are two different claims about what a panchang is for — but they are not the same numbers and no page should let you assume they are.
Amanta or purnimanta. Whether a lunar month ends at the new Moon or the full Moon. This does not change a single time on the home page; it changes the name of the month, and therefore the date of a festival. This build names both, because picking one would silently take a side in the one place this whole page exists to avoid taking sides silently. On any day of Krishna paksha the two disagree: the amavasya of Diwali closes amanta Ashvina and falls in purnimanta Kartika, and Janmashtami is Shravana Krishna Ashtami in Pune and Bhadrapada Krishna Ashtami in Delhi on the same afternoon. The calendar draws both as bars →
Adhika masa. A lunar month is 29.53 days and a solar month about 30.44, so roughly every 32.5 months one lunar month contains no solar ingress at all and is intercalary — repeated, and marked Adhika. It is computed from the same rule that names the months rather than from a table, and 2026 has one: Adhika Jyeshtha, 16 May to 15 June. Its mirror, a kshaya month, is detected and deliberately left unnamed; sources compound the skipped names differently and this page will not invent one.
Ayanamsa. The offset between the tropical and sidereal zodiacs, which decides which nakshatra the Moon is in near a boundary. Lahiri, Raman and KP differ by enough to move it. This build uses Lahiri and says so, on every page.
Why the minutes can be trusted
Saying “today is Krishna Tritiya” needs the accuracy any astrology app has always had. Printing “ends 14:37” needs about a hundred times more, and three ordinary shortcuts each cost more than the number being published:
The Moona truncated lunar series good to one arcminute is 1.8 minutes of time on any tithi, nakshatra or yoga end, because the Moon moves 32.9′ per hour
full series
The Suna tithi is the Moon’s elongation from the Sun, closing at 12.19° a day — so 0.01° of Sun is 1.2 minutes of time, the same size as the Moon error
VSOP87D
ΔTorbital series are functions of terrestrial time, and clocks keep universal time. They differ by about 69 seconds today, which is 38 arcseconds of Moon — four times the whole error budget
applied
Rise and setfound by scanning the body’s real altitude against a refracted horizon and bisecting the crossing, not from the hour-angle formula — which assumes a declination fixed for the day, and is therefore fine for the Sun and wrong for the Moon
scanned
All four are properties of
engine/, which every surface on this network computes from
and none of them duplicates. The astronomy is verified against independent
authority — JPL Horizons and NOAA — and never against another panchang
site. Two sites agreeing proves agreement, not correctness; they may
simply share a mistake. Convention is a separate question with a separate
check, against the tradition this page declares it followed.
What is deliberately missing
Dur muhurtam needs a per-weekday list of muhurta numbers that differs between sources. Varjyam and amrit kaal need a per-nakshatra fraction table. Festival dates need a rule per festival, the moment of the day each one is anchored at, and the regional variants — the largest of the four by a distance. Solar festivals and the calendar year are a different computation again. The month name used to be on this list and no longer is: both systems are computed and named as of the ruling above.
Each of them is a row a conventional panchang layout has a slot for, and filling a slot by inventing a table and printing the invention to the minute is the one failure this product cannot survive. They are named here instead. When they arrive they will arrive with the tradition they came from written next to them.
Where the computation happens
In your browser. There is no server holding a table of answers and no request carrying your city anywhere — which is why this works with the network off, and why it will keep working for any date you ask it for rather than only the range somebody generated. The city atlas is bundled for the same reason.
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