Panchang Today: Aaj Ki Tithi, Choghadiya & Shubh Muhurat

What the panchang tells you

The panchang is the traditional Vedic calendar, and it answers a different question from an ordinary one. A Gregorian calendar tells you the date. A panchang tells you what kind of day it is — which nakshatra the Moon is passing through, which tithi is running, and which hours are considered favourable or best avoided. The values above are computed for the city you select, because almost all of them depend on your local sunrise.

The word itself means five limbs, and those five are the whole structure:

• Tithi — the lunar day — the Sun-Moon angle in 12-degree steps, 30 to a lunar month
• Nakshatra — which of the 27 lunar mansions the Moon sits in, changing roughly daily
• Yoga — derived from the combined longitudes of Sun and Moon; 27 in the cycle
• Karana — half a tithi — two karanas fall within each lunar day
• Vara — the weekday, each ruled by one of the seven classical planets

Today's nakshatra, and why it changes mid-day

The Moon completes a circuit of the zodiac in about 27.3 days, which is why the 27 nakshatras map so neatly onto it — roughly one per day. But “roughly” is doing real work in that sentence. The Moon speeds up and slows down across its orbit, so a nakshatra can run from about 20 hours to over 26, and the changeover almost never lands at midnight. That is why the panchang above gives you the exact time today's nakshatra ends and the next begins, rather than a single label for the whole day.

This is also the difference between the nakshatra today and your nakshatra. The one above is where the Moon is right now, shared by everyone. Your birth nakshatra is where the Moon stood at the moment you were born, and it does not change — you can find yours with the nakshatra calculator, or read about all 27 nakshatras and what each one means.

Some nakshatra days are watched more closely than others. Pushya in particular is the one Indian households traditionally choose for buying gold, and when it lands on a Thursday it forms Guru Pushya, the most auspicious version of it. The Pushya nakshatra dates for 2026 and 2027 are worked out to the minute, including why the Guru Pushya window is shorter than the nakshatra itself.

Rahu Kaal, Choghadiya, and what the panchang gives you

Most people checking a panchang are really asking one thing: is now a good time to do this? The clearest answer the tradition gives is Rahu Kaal — a window of roughly 90 minutes each day that is avoided for starting anything new. It is worked out by splitting the time between sunrise and sunset into eight parts and taking a different part on each weekday, which is why it moves with both your city and the season, and why the panchang above asks where you are.

A note on how seriously to take it. Rahu Kaal is guidance about timing, not a prediction about outcomes. Classical practice uses it to choose when to begin something already worth doing — it does not hold that a venture started in Rahu Kaal is doomed. Work already under way is generally considered unaffected, and where the timing cannot be helped, tradition is a good deal more relaxed about it than the internet tends to be.

For the two days most people plan a gold purchase around, Dhanteras and Akshaya Tritiya, the dates and the favourable buying hours are on the gold buying muhurat page.

Which part of the day it falls on is fixed by the weekday and never changes: the second of the eight parts on Monday, the fifth on Wednesday, the eighth on Sunday. Only the clock time moves, with your sunrise and the season. There is a Rahu Kaal timing table for every weekday with the current windows worked out for eight Indian cities.

Choghadiya is the finer-grained answer, and the one most people actually want. It splits daylight into eight periods and the night into eight more, each carrying a name and a character: Amrit is the most favourable, Shubh and Labh are good, Char is neutral and traditionally suits travel, and Kaal, Rog and Udveg are the ones to work around. Because the divisions run from sunrise to sunset, their lengths shift through the year — they are rarely a tidy ninety minutes. The panchang above marks the period running right now, so most of the time you do not need to read the table at all.

Everything the panchang above computes for your city and date:

• Tithi — the lunar day, with the exact time it ends
• Nakshatra — the lunar mansion the Moon occupies, and when it changes over
• Yoga — the Sun-Moon combination for the day, one of 27
• Karana — the half-tithi running, with its end time
• Vara — the weekday and its ruling planet
• Rahu Kaal — the daily inauspicious window, derived from your local sunrise
• Choghadiya — eight day and eight night periods, with the one running right now marked
• Shubh Muhurat — Abhijit Muhurat around noon and Brahma Muhurta before dawn
• Yamaganda and Gulika Kaal — the two other daily windows avoided for new beginnings
• Hora — the 24 planetary hours, with the one running now marked
• Tomorrow's panchang — the tithi, nakshatra and timings for tomorrow, below today
• Next Ekadashi, Purnima and Amavasya — the next date of each, with the tithi start and end
• Sunrise and sunset — for your selected city — almost everything else is derived from these

Common questions