What is a panchang?

A panchang is the traditional day-book of the sky. It is not a forecast of a life, and it is not a list of warnings. For one place and one civil day it names five things: the lunar day in force at sunrise, the Moon's nakshatra, the yoga, the karana, and the weekday. Families in Jharkhand and across India have read those five lines for vows, festivals, and the start of ordinary work. This note is about how to read them.

What the page is for

A printed panchang is a calendar with a lunar spine. The English date on a phone is a solar count: the same date returns every year. A tithi does not. The Moon's gain on the Sun sets the religious day, and local sunrise decides which name that civil morning wears. The panchang is the sheet that joins those two clocks.

People open it for a small set of questions. Which tithi is it at sunrise here? Which nakshatra holds the Moon? Is there a named window for a wedding, a griha pravesh, or a journey? The answers are labels on the sky. They are not a grade of the person who reads them.

Astro will show the five labels for a city you choose when the panchang page is filled in. In this beta that page is empty, so this note does not print today's limbs for Dumka or for anywhere else.

The five limbs

The limbs are tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana, and vara. A useful page gives each one a name and, for the first four, a time when that name ends. The end time is local. A slip printed for another city is the wrong slip to carry across the state.

Tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana, and the weekday are the five limbs. The drawing has no names on it, because today's names are not calculated here yet.

Tithi is the lunar day. It advances when the Moon has gained another 12 degrees on the Sun. Thirty tithis make a lunar month. Fifteen run from new moon toward full moon. That bright half is shukla paksha. Fifteen run from full moon toward new moon. That dark half is krishna paksha. Purnima is the full moon. Amavasya is the new moon. The other names repeat in both halves: Pratipada, Dwitiya, Tritiya, Chaturthi, Panchami, Shashthi, Saptami, Ashtami, Navami, Dashami, Ekadashi, Dwadashi, Trayodashi, and Chaturdashi. A name without the paksha is incomplete.

Nakshatra is the Moon's mansion. The sidereal ecliptic is split into twenty-seven equal parts of 13 degrees and 20 minutes. The panchang names the part the Moon occupies. That is today's nakshatra. A birth nakshatra is the same ruler applied to the Moon at birth. They are often different, because they are different moments.

Yoga is another slice of the combined motion of Sun and Moon, also 13 degrees and 20 minutes wide. It is a label read off the longitudes. Karana is half a tithi. Because a tithi itself varies in length, a karana does too. Vara is the weekday, Sunday through Saturday, counted from one sunrise to the next.

The day starts at sunrise

The civil day in a panchang is not midnight to midnight. It is sunrise to the next sunrise at that place. If a tithi is in force when the Sun rises, that tithi is the day's tithi, even when it ends an hour later. If one tithi covers two sunrises, it belongs to two civil days. If a tithi falls entirely between two sunrises, that civil morning never wears its name.

This is why a vrata can seem to fall on different English dates in two towns, and why a festival eve in one house is the festival morning in another. The rule is local sunrise, plus the school's rule for which end of the tithi counts for that vow. Some vows care about the tithi at sunrise. Some care about the tithi at a later hour. A careful panchang says which.

The panchang day runs from sunrise to the next sunrise. Midnight on a phone is a different boundary.

The day's tithi is the one in force at sunrise, not the one that happens to be running at noon.

An illustration helps, and it is only an illustration. Suppose sunrise is a little before six, and a tithi ends at seven. The morning still wears the tithi that was alive at sunrise. The clock times in that sentence are not Dumka's times, and they are not a muhurat. They only show the rule.

Why the town is part of the answer

Sunrise is local. So is the timezone that turns a universal instant into a clock reading. Near a change of tithi, Dumka and a city far to the west can print different tithis on the same English date. That is a property of the horizon, not a quarrel between two faiths.

Place also decides the end times printed beside nakshatra and yoga. A window that closes at half past ten in one city can still be open, or already shut, in another. Carrying a panchang from a distant press and treating its minutes as local is the usual way to misread an otherwise honest sheet.

Two honest panchangs can still disagree when they use different formulas for the Moon. Drik positions and older vakya formulas can end the same tithi minutes or hours apart. Amanta months and purnimanta months can put two month names on one sky. Those splits have their own note. They do not change the five-limb shape of the page.

What a reading is, and what it is not

A panchang supports a choice of day. It does not diagnose an illness, name a death, settle a case, or promise money. Skipping a listed window is a choice about when to begin. The sheet does not grade the rest of a life.

Trait lists, fear of a dosha, and "you must do this or else" are a different kind of writing. They are not what the five limbs are. The limbs are names and end times.

Astro's locked sky, when the page calculates, is drik plus the Lahiri ayanamsa. A mode that copies one family's older panchang is a later choice. Until the calculation is on the page, publishing today's five names for a city would be an invention. This note refuses that invention.

A note on Astro is for understanding. It is a matter of belief and reflection. It is not a promise about health, death, money, or the law.

What Astro is, in this beta: https://astro.lawazia.tech/about